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So, first, I know that PF2 still has a good solid set of legs on it. I wouldn't be surprised to see it keep going for another 5 years or so, and that's cool.
At the same time, we all know that PF3 is coming eventually. Eventually the lifespan of this version of the game will come to a natural close, and it'll be time for it to be rebuilt.
We also know that the Paizo designers sometimes read these boards (and respond!) and so if we see structural issues with the current game, and we can come up with interesting workarounds, then that's maybe worthwhile.
This one is to talk about caster vs martial longevity over the course of the adventuring day, and some of the cool stuff, and some of the not so cool stuff, and possibly try to come up with solutions that let us keep the good bits without so much of the bad bits.
Martials are relatively simple. The core ability of the martial is very consistent. if you have enough healing power in your party to get their HP back to full, that generally means that they're good to go for the next fight, and can pretty much keep going indefinitely. They're great for people who don't want to worry about resource economies over the course of the day.
Casters are more complicated. Their more powerful effects take the form of a pile of daily resources. This means that they can burst a lot harder. A caster burning top slots is a lot more effective than that same caster throwing cantrips and focus spells. This is great for people who enjoy the resource-juggling game that it creates, deciding which fights to focus on and which to dial back on, picking the moments to use their more potent effects, and so forth.
All of that is fine. The problem is when it comes to the length of the adventuring day. Casters run out. Martials don't. A caster who can be assured that their adventuring day is one fight long can unload everything they have. A caster who's gong to be in a day that's six or eight encounters long is going to be seriously struggling. This causes a number of issues in both directions. In the one side, casters are motivated to advocate for the ten-minute workday, which can make games feel skewed, and if they get it, they can feel overpowered. On the other side, in a game where the days run long, or where the casters have credible reason to expect them to run long, the rationing of slots can make them feel weak.
Also, in some ways it can feel like the various options that add sustainability to casters are not necessarily as well-balanced as other parts of the system. They're harder to plug into the math.
So this thread is about discussing ways to separate these two concepts - to let the people who want to play caster have their ability to prioritize some encounters over others while not making them overpowered in short adventuring days and underpowered in long.
This is *not* a thread about specifics of anything having to do with the current classes or the balance of power between them. If you want to argue about whether casters are too weak and/or too strong there's an entirely different thread that's doing that just fine right now. Please go do that there.
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So... the clearest answer that I see is to have some sort of resource that the caster can build up or spend down in encounters, that lasts at least as long as an adventuring day. Wake up int he morning with a decent supply of this stuff, but not a full tank, and then let you build up by going low-power or really unleash for the stronger stuff.
Of course, this has some weirdness of its own. In particular, it means that low-risk encounters actually give resources to the party. This has obvious bag-of-rats cheese issues, but those at least have well-known solutions. The weirder thing is that it does this on intended encounters as well. Like, suddenly, if you toss a few easy goblin encounters between the party and the big bad, they're likely to be walking into that big bad fight with more resources, rather than less. That gets a little odd.
In many cases, it also gives the players reason to want to drag their fights out. Like, if casters are regenerating magic fuel by blasting with cantrips, then once you've beaten the enemy down tot he point where they're not much of a threat, the thing you really want to do is disable them as much as possible, and let the casters chip away at them with those cantrips until they finally keep over and die. You might even want to heal them a few times, if the economy of ti works out right.
So... maybe something in the loot pools? Like, in addition to exp and whatever treasure there is to be found, there's some sort of caster resource that they can draw from defeated foes to fill up their resource pools. This has issues too, of course. Like, if all you do is drive your foes away, then you're not exactly in a position to extract their essences. It also seems like it might be a little tricky to square with doing things nonlethally... and that's before we get to the part where drawing the energies that power your magics from the bodies of fallen foes is just so very edgy, and all that that can bring with it.
So yeah. It's not a trivial issue... which is why I figure that it's a potentially useful issue to brainstorm about and chew over and maybe have people come up with ideas that I can't come up with. Anyone have thoughts?
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I will think about PF3 casters in about 5 years or more when Paizo announces a new edition after many new classes and books released, after a tested a played the new D&D 5.5, SF2, DaggerHeart and DC20 and get new feelings and ideas from these experiences.
Now is too early to discuss such thing.
I'd ditch the slots, keep the auto scaling for DCs, then do something like 1+Rank Actions required to cast a spell of that rank. So charge and fire at will trading time for power, instead of the abominable 5 Minute Work Day.
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How about if you have a Wizard that casts a limited set of researched and learned spells like a PF2 Kineticist?
Or a Wizard that has a collection of useful focus spells?
I will think about PF3 casters in about 5 years or more when Paizo announces a new edition after many new classes and books released, after a tested a played the new D&D 5.5, SF2, DaggerHeart and DC20 and get new feelings and ideas from these experiences.
Now is too early to discuss such thing.
I disagree. It's way too early to be trying to come up with final conclusions, but the early discussion can be helpful. Get the ideas out there, get them into people's heads, let folks think about it for a while and come up with new ideas. Then, when we finally do get to the point where things have actually started to happen, there will be a body of thoughts and ideas that people have already worked with to a degree. You won't be starting from scratch. That kind of early prep can result in better answers overall.
Also, in particular, when the new version finally does come out, that's suddenly going to be a time to talk about all sorts of implications and suggestions and whatever. The hype will be high, the discussions will be frenetic, and the mental resources to consider this stuff will have many, many topics to consider. Getting this kind of discussion started early, and working through at least some of the implications now means that when we finally do get to that time, we won't need to spend as much time/energy on it to get answers of comparable quality, and can afford to spend that time/energy on the hundred-some-odd other topics that will suddenly be immediately and intensely important.
How about if you have a Wizard that casts a limited set of researched and learned spells like a PF2 Kineticist?
Or a Wizard that has a collection of useful focus spells?
Part of the point is that I don't want them to be another kineticist. I love the kineticist, but that's me. There are people out there who enjoy the idea of having medium-term resorurces to consider and husband and use efficiently. That's part of the game for them, and I don't want to take that away... and saying "everything is a cantrip or a focus spell" would do that.
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It's because I know that my experience and ideas will change a lot over this time due to the experience gained from the new materials. That's why I think it's too early to speculate on caster ideas for PF3.
For example, DC20, which is heavily influenced by PF2, comes with a proposal to use MP by default, this already brings a very different and interesting aspect (and honestly more modern and more familiar to new players than casting through spell slots). Depending on how interesting things turn out there, my perception of good ideas can change a lot.
D&D4 ditched the spell slots and players roughly hated it. Casters were not feeling like casters anymore the same way a Kineticist is no caster for anyone who likes casters.
I'd personnaly strongly modify the slotted spells. 10 ranks are far too many, for no valid reason. I'd reduce the number of spell slots, limit them to the significant spell ranks (the 2 top ones) and allow Arcana/Religion/Occultism/Nature checks to reproduce the effects of basic spells (Detect Magic at Trained, Comprehend Languages at Expert, Fly/Spider Climb/Swim at Master, for example).
So casters keep their utility without having to micro manage tons of resources and you keep the high level spells for extra oomph.
I'd also strongly think about cantrips that properly scale, unlike current cantrips that quickly become useless. And same thing for Focus Spells that have massive discrepencies with some very valid ones and tons of very niche or bad ones.
I also think casters should have more impact than martials to compensate for their lack of tanking ability. So Focus Spells/Cantrips and other at will resources should be on par with martials attack.
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All of that is fine. The problem is when it comes to the length of the adventuring day. Casters run out. Martials don't. A caster who can be assured that their adventuring day is one fight long can unload everything they have. A caster who's gong to be in a day that's six or eight encounters long is going to be seriously struggling. This causes a number of issues in both directions. In the one side, casters are motivated to advocate for the ten-minute workday, which can make games feel skewed, and if they get it, they can feel overpowered. On the other side, in a game where the days run long, or where the casters have credible reason to expect them to run long, the rationing of slots can make them feel weak.
While this is true, it is worth noting that the game does not just encode resource consumption as a downside. It is also encoded as an upside.
Yes a caster running through a day that's 10+ Trivial/Low/Moderate encounters will feel like they're being forced to strain their resources, but a martial running through a day that is just 1-2 Severe/Extreme encounters will find that the caster's nova potential isn't just good to have it actually feels mandatory to help them clear the encounter. This nova can take many forms: a blaster softening up a whole crowd of foes and/or throwing turn after turn of reliable damage at the +3/+4 boss, a controller setting up the battlefield to be unwinnable for the enemy, a debuffer setting up their biggest debuff to make their martial buddies crit, or a healer practically reversing time on the martials with their heals.
This is in part why the conversation around caster sustainability can be so polarizing. Suggestions like this one:
I also think casters should have more impact than martials to compensate for their lack of tanking ability. So Focus Spells/Cantrips and other at will resources should be on par with martials attack.
often fail to account for the fact that resource consumption isn't just a downside. It has an upside too. If you mitigate the downside too much you run into the situation where the upside is just too good not to bring to the table.
I think that any attempt to make caster's more sustainable must end up making casters less explosive, and that is a very hard design space to fill because many people view the explosiveness of casters to be one of their defining qualities.
So my final suggestion would be:
1. Raise the floor of spammable, sustainable options like cantrips and focus spells (and just expand on focus spells in general, they're very cool). In particular, make 1-Action cantrips and focus spells so that options like Elemental Toss, Psi Burst, Force Bolt, etc become standard rather than exceptions (notably, it feels like the game sometimes assumes my spellcaster is carrying a bow, even if I don't want to).
2. Lower the ceiling of the top rank of slots relative to the rest of the stuff in the game. This will probably have a run-on impact on the rest of the proficiency scaling and rune scaling in the game.
3. Make your explosive and sustainable options more "fungible", so casters can choose to extend their resources for long days and compress them for short ones. This is probably best achieved via something like mana points.
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I'm of two minds on this:
1. How big a problem is this REALLY? Yes, its a thing that causes issues, but so would any other change. As mentioned already, 4e tried to remove this problem and there was a lot of pushback since it didn't feel like you were playing a caster anymore.
If this isn't a problem that needs radical change to fix, then all that needs doing is smoothing it out a bit with better resources and fewer things to manage (such as having less spell ranks and more repeatable options).
2. If you do want radical change, I tend to like MP/mana pools. They're something that is widely understood in gaming, so you won't have a hard time explaining to players how they work. They put a cap on how much juice you can expend in a fight, so if you really want to dump everything into one super massive Explosion and then be done for the fight, you can. Or you can ration it out.
They also give you something that you can theoretically renew between fights to some degree. Take a 10 minute rest? Get some MP back (this is effectively what focus pools are now, except it's a MP pool of 3 that only works for those spells). Need more MP quickly? Use a mana potion.
It's also less tracking, since you have one number instead of dozens of slots of different levels to try and fit your spells into. But it's still ultimately a limited resource, and managing a limited resource is part of the feel of being a caster in these games. If you really take that away, you risk making classes feel very samey.
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I just don’t think potential PF3 discussions belong in a PF2 general discussion forum because they just will innately attract edition flame warring here, and don’t actually represent a PF2 conversation, and will sour a lot of folks coming to Pathfinder 2nd edition forums to learn about the game with excitement or sincere curiosity. At this point it is really a homebrew conversation.
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D&D4 ditched the spell slots and players roughly hated it. Casters were not feeling like casters anymore the same way a Kineticist is no caster for anyone who likes casters.
I'd personnaly strongly modify the slotted spells. 10 ranks are far too many, for no valid reason. I'd reduce the number of spell slots, limit them to the significant spell ranks (the 2 top ones) and allow Arcana/Religion/Occultism/Nature checks to reproduce the effects of basic spells (Detect Magic at Trained, Comprehend Languages at Expert, Fly/Spider Climb/Swim at Master, for example).
So casters keep their utility without having to micro manage tons of resources and you keep the high level spells for extra oomph.
I'd also strongly think about cantrips that properly scale, unlike current cantrips that quickly become useless. And same thing for Focus Spells that have massive discrepencies with some very valid ones and tons of very niche or bad ones.
I also think casters should have more impact than martials to compensate for their lack of tanking ability. So Focus Spells/Cantrips and other at will resources should be on par with martials attack.
Broadly speaking I agree with you on the caster vs kineticist thing. I'll say that there were a number of reasons that people didn't like 4e, and the caster thing was only one of them. There were also a lot of people who did like 4e. I was one of them. That said, it wasn't the abandoning of spell slots specifically that did it, I think. It was the fact that the resource economy for casters and the resource economy for martials was the same. I don't think we need to tie ourselves to the slot system itself, necessarily, but I do think there's real value to having casters able to play with resource economies that persist beyond individual fights.
I think the idea of effectively limiting slots to your highest spell ranks is interesting, and it lends itself to an entirely different idea of cantrips and focus spells. Like, just going off of the current progressions for the moment, let's suppose that you're level 9. You can cast 5th level spells as slot spells. You can cast 4th level spells by spending a focus point. You can cast 3rd and under for free... and just follow that all the way up. The spells we know today as "cantrips" would be the 0-level spells that anyone could use.
Obviously that's not the final form. There's some hairy math in there that would need serious massaging to get anywhere with, and it might not be worth the effort to balance. There's also the feel of it. Maybe they just wouldn't be able to give the big spells that awesomeness feel without separating them from the free-use spells by more of a margin than that. Still, I feel like the idea of "as you go up in level, your big powerful spells turn into your cantrips" is potentially kind of cool. It also combos in potentially interesting ways with an entirely separate idea to make most spells be scaling across levels, rather than individual distinct spells. It becomes a question of "how much fireball do you want to pay for this time? How much fireball do you think you need?" That could be interesting.
At the same time, I feel like it thins the issue, but doesn't actually solve it. Again, you're stuck with a starter pile of daily resources, and no natural way to recover or unlock more. We're still in a situation where short days favor casters and long days favor martials.
Maybe... somehow tie it to exp gain? I know it feels kind of janky, but if we had some handwavy explanation of what exp was, then we could tie it to that. A challenging encounter charges up this many spell slots, and an extreme encounter charges up that many. Works even better if you have the charge-up hit on rolling initiative. It woudl be giving the PCs information, but that could actually work.
"Guys... guys? I don't know what that thing is, but my spell slots just filled. All of them."
"Run."
All of that is fine. The problem is when it comes to the length of the adventuring day. Casters run out. Martials don't. A caster who can be assured that their adventuring day is one fight long can unload everything they have. A caster who's gong to be in a day that's six or eight encounters long is going to be seriously struggling. This causes a number of issues in both directions. In the one side, casters are motivated to advocate for the ten-minute workday, which can make games feel skewed, and if they get it, they can feel overpowered. On the other side, in a game where the days run long, or where the casters have credible reason to expect them to run long, the rationing of slots can make them feel weak.While this is true, it is worth noting that the game does not just encode resource consumption as a downside. It is also encoded as an upside.
I did mention that in the section you quoted. Perhaps I wasn't explicit enough about it? Indeed, that's part of the problem. Effectively, the "Some classes are constrained by daily resources. Others aren't." paradigm leads to a situation where game balance skews between the classes depending on the length of the adventuring day. That's the issue I'm hoping to get ideas for here.
So my final suggestion would be:
1. Raise the floor of spammable, sustainable options like cantrips and focus spells (and just expand on focus spells in general, they're very cool). In particular, make 1-Action cantrips and focus spells so that options like Elemental Toss, Psi Burst, Force Bolt, etc become standard rather than exceptions (notably, it feels like the game sometimes assumes my spellcaster is carrying a bow, even if I don't want to).
2. Lower the ceiling of the top rank of slots relative to the rest of the stuff in the game. This will probably have a run-on impact on the rest of the proficiency scaling and rune scaling in the game.
3. Make your explosive and sustainable options more "fungible", so casters can choose to extend their resources for long days and compress them for short ones. This is probably best achieved via something like mana points.
That doesn't actually address the issue, though. I'm not saying that these are necessarily bad ideas, but at best they're reducing the overall intensity of the "daily resources" thing, both good and bad, and not really changing its nature.
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I think 5 years is underestimating the longevity of this edition with the Remaster.
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If you analyze the current classes, what separates caster class is quality feats, innate class abilities, and focus abilities.
These abilities are built to help a class sustain without using slots. A caster class with quality feats and class abilities that feel impactful they can use all day makes a class more satisfying.
When the caster is solely reliant on a limited resource like spell slots or slotted abilities that run out daily with a roughly 50% fail rate, then things start to feel bad save for a few players who are satisfied with the class for reasons other than how it performs. They don't even measure performance and go almost completely by anecdotal evidence or feel.
It's boring, bad, useless, or hard to work class abilities that kill a class in PF2. Even some of the martial classes like investigator and swashbuckler have the same problem.
Which is another reason why the caster vs. martial discussions are such a joke. You telling me a sorcerer or wizard isn't much better off than an investigator or swashbuckler? No one is buying that.
I just don’t think potential PF3 discussions belong in a PF2 general discussion forum because they just will innately attract edition flame warring here, and don’t actually represent a PF2 conversation, and will sour a lot of folks coming to Pathfinder 2nd edition forums to learn about the game with excitement or sincere curiosity. At this point it is really a homebrew conversation.
I dunno. I see the argument that you're making, but in my experience, discussions like this (especially when clearly labeled) attract a lot less flame warring (and thus newbie souring) than, say, discussions about how (person) feels that (class) is too weak.
Like, have any of these responses been something you'd describe as "edition flame warring"? I'm not seeing any.
If you analyze the current classes, what separates caster class is quality feats, innate class abilities, and focus abilities.
These abilities are built to help a class sustain without using slots. A caster class with quality feats and class abilities that feel impactful they can use all day makes a class more satisfying.
When the caster is solely reliant on a limited resource like spell slots or slotted abilities that run out daily with a roughly 50% fail rate, then things start to feel bad save for a few players who are satisfied with the class for reasons other than how it performs. They don't even measure performance and go almost completely by anecdotal evidence or feel.
It's boring, bad, useless, or hard to work class abilities that kill a class in PF2. Even some of the martial classes like investigator and swashbuckler have the same problem.
Which is another reason why the caster vs. martial discussions are such a joke. You telling me a sorcerer or wizard isn't much better off than an investigator or swashbuckler? No one is buying that.
I'm trying to address a very specific thing here, and it's something more structural than that. It's not about whether any given class is a good class or a bad class, or is fun to play or isn't. That's not the point of the thread. It's about trying to address the way that "cares about husbanding resources between encounters and deciding when to throw the impressive stuff and when to hold back" (which some people really enjoy) is currently linked hard to "becomes significantly stronger in very short adventuring days and much weaker in very long ones" (which warps balance math in weird ways and has a number of mild but unfortunate second-order effects). The rest of it... there's plenty of threads to argue about that stuff. This thread is trying to come up with general solutions to a very specific problem that exists in a potential space that's still vague enough that it doesn't have any specific classes in it yet to argue about.
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Clearly belongs in the PF3 forums!
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Build every caster on a hybrid of the kineticist plus X chassis.
Essentially make them all 'half as much' as a kineticist'. Half the impulses, lose the blast.
Add in features specific to that class.
Summoner: You summon demons and control them with diplomacy, intimidation, and recall knowledge. Yo have a pool of something you can use to force the control. Your "impulses" are demons you have permanently bound to yourself in a process which alters you - tattoos, scars, deformities, smells, or whatever.
Wizard: You research magic and have a 'focus pool' you can use to cast spells you have learned. You can do rituals that take time for great power. Your 'impulses' are spells that you have made a core part of yourself. Your class feature lets you swap around 'int mod' of these per day. Essentially for every spell you can either put it into the impulse for a slightly limited version, or cast it with a focus point which lets you modify some traits on the fly, or spend an hour in a ritual to cast an amped up version.
Witch: Your familiar has a focus pool that casts spells with the traits modified according to the nature of your pact. Your 'impulses' are hexes - you can place any spell your familiar knows into this, swap 'pact relevant stat mod' of them out per day, and their traits are 'fixed' once in the slot. You can use a cauldron (even just a cup or bowl) to do rituals for amped up versions.
Psion: Flip the ritual thing. Your focus pool is where you amp up the spells of your impulses. Your impulses are normal power and can swap out 'relevant stat mod' of them per day. You can meditate for an hour to do something...
Sorcerer:
- basically a kineticist. Even the blast. But the effect / theme is relevant to your 'sorcerer origin' rather than an element. Remove the 'bloodline' and replace it with a 'magical origin'. Things like "smoked herbs with an elder dragon and became magical", or "looked at the stars and saw cosmic secrets", etc... this is basically "fantasy themed super hero origins".
etc...
Refine, balance, make it able to have both tightly themed and generalists.
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In terms of micro changes, actually committing to focus spells as a stamina enhancing tool is a big one.
One of the clearest gaps I keep seeing in these conversations about casters is that ones with good focus spells that improve their longevity feel good and ones with gimmicky focus spells or focus spells that just enhance their normal routine feel worse.
This is especially true with the refocus changes in Remaster.
In terms of macro changes, it just genuinely seems like a bad idea to design a game that minimizes the impact of attrition and then design a class within that game that is specifically balanced around resource attrition. Either rethink spell slots or rethink the rest system.
Yes a caster running through a day that's 10+ Trivial/Low/Moderate encounters will feel like they're being forced to strain their resources, but a martial running through a day that is just 1-2 Severe/Extreme encounters will find that the caster's nova potential isn't just good to have it actually feels mandatory to help them clear the encounter.
Don't really agree at all. Casters do better on shorter days, but unless the encounter is designed for it, I'd never describe it as feeling particularly mandatory.
IMO that's one of the key issues in terms of discrepancy here. A fighter on encounter 1/1 for a day is still going to hit hard, feel good, and deal extremely nice damage. You're not going to feel their stamina, but the class still functions excellently in a way that a wizard on encounter 12/15 never will.
I just don’t think potential PF3 discussions belong in a PF2 general discussion forum because they just will innately attract edition flame warring here, and don’t actually represent a PF2 conversation, and will sour a lot of folks coming to Pathfinder 2nd edition forums to learn about the game with excitement or sincere curiosity. At this point it is really a homebrew conversation.I dunno. I see the argument that you're making, but in my experience, discussions like this (especially when clearly labeled) attract a lot less flame warring (and thus newbie souring) than, say, discussions about how (person) feels that (class) is too weak.
Like, have any of these responses been something you'd describe as "edition flame warring"? I'm not seeing any.
I'm trying to address a very specific thing here, and it's something more structural than that. It's not about whether...If you analyze the current classes, what separates caster class is quality feats, innate class abilities, and focus abilities.
These abilities are built to help a class sustain without using slots. A caster class with quality feats and class abilities that feel impactful they can use all day makes a class more satisfying.
When the caster is solely reliant on a limited resource like spell slots or slotted abilities that run out daily with a roughly 50% fail rate, then things start to feel bad save for a few players who are satisfied with the class for reasons other than how it performs. They don't even measure performance and go almost completely by anecdotal evidence or feel.
It's boring, bad, useless, or hard to work class abilities that kill a class in PF2. Even some of the martial classes like investigator and swashbuckler have the same problem.
Which is another reason why the caster vs. martial discussions are such a joke. You telling me a sorcerer or wizard isn't much better off than an investigator or swashbuckler? No one is buying that.
This is why I am illustrating the difference between classes.
Caster classes with fun, impactful abilities that can be used all day are generally more fun than limited resource classes.
The wizard is the main caster class in PF2 that relies almost solely on a limited resource like spell slots whether it is base spell slots, a feat like free scrolls, and theses that all build off spell slots whether spell substitution to change spell slots, spell blending to have more high level spell slots, or staff nexus to put more charges in a staff. Their entire schtick is spell slots.
Spell slots have a dual problem which isn't often discussed.
1. The one you're mentioning where they run out of spell slots, which is often a low level problem.
2. The other one is high level slots where few classes run out of spell slots. I regularly have tons of slots left at high level on my casters after an adventuring day. Sorcerers have a bunch of slots and you rarely need to blow off a ton of spells at high level to do good damage.
Which is why it's more fun to play a class with stronger abilities on the class chassis that are usable all day like a bard song or good focus spell or a hex or a cool cantrip.
Building classes entirely around a limited resources like a wizard creates these issues because a limited resource with a 50% or so failure rate means only 50% of your limited spells work with a great effect.
Then you have the action limitations of PF2. In PF1, you could cast a ton of buffs and prep spells which made you feel like you were doing something strong. But now almost everything is jammed into the 3 action round, so you have to be able to impact those rounds.
Then you have short fights of 3 to 5 rounds. That means you have 9 to 15 actions to impact a fight. That is 3 to 5 spells depending on what you're doing in a given round with the spells having a 50% fail rate give or take.
So if you're a class that is almost completely dependent on your slots to be effective, your 3 to 5 rounds means you will only maximally affect the fight in half those rounds, then you'll have a reduced effect.
Whereas a class that uses a resource that is easily replenished like focus spells or is usable all day like a bard song, can impact the battle in every round, all day on top of using spell slots to further impact the battle.
This works very well for those classes with quality all day options. They don't suffer the resource management issues of a class like the wizard who is almost wholly dependent on spell slots with a 50% failure rate if they are cast to affect a resistant target.
That means every single class should have a base design with unlimited or easily replenished powerful focus or class abilities that build of their class fantasy theme mixed with a limited use resource like spell slots.
In terms of macro changes, it just genuinely seems like a bad idea to design a game that minimizes the impact of attrition and then design a class within that game that is specifically balanced around resource attrition. Either rethink spell slots or rethink the rest system.
...and, indeed, this is what I'm trying to do with this thread.
Is it me? Have I been unclear? Like, literally no one else in this discussion has addressed the issue as I presented it and asked for assistance on. Nobody. When you look around the room, and you're the weird one out....
I try, one more time, to explain the actual issue I'm trying to address.
- Caster Resource Attrition: this is the bit where, over the course of the average adventuring day, the standard caster will slowly run out of resources. I assert that this is bad, for reasons mostly centered on how it makes certain parts of the balance math ooky, and also provides perverse incentives. I would like to have casters that, over the average adventuring day, maintain a pretty even balance on resources spent vs resources gained.
- Caster Resource Husbanding: This is the bit where, in each individual encounter, a caster has decisions to make about how many resources they're going to spend on that encounter. This is the thing that lets them go heavier on the harder fights and lighter on the easier fights. I assert that this is good. It makes casters feel more like casters, and it's something that a notable chunk of the playerbase enjoys playing with.
In basically every game of this lineage I've played, the two have been completely inextricable from one another. Resource Husbandry has only every been achieved through a Resource Attrition mechanism. That is the thing I want to change. I want to let people play the Resource Husbandry game without the downsides that Resource Attrition brings with it.
As a side benefit, just about any way of doing this would also make the Resource Husbandry game more intuitive. One of the things that makes it weird is that you don't know how long your day is going to be. You don't know if the encounter you're in is the last encounter of the day or the start of a long slog. It means that you have to estimate reasonable expenditure with a component of wild guessing... and "guess what the GM is thinking" is not actually a fun game, regardless of what the GM might think. On the flip side, if you're somehow recovering a semi-predictable level of casting resources every encounter, then you know what the budget for that encounter is. You can go over budget or under budget based on the needs of the moment, but, critically, you know which one you're doing. I feel like this might make casters more accessible. They'd certainly be more accessible to me. That's just a side benefit, though, of uncertain utility. I'm not presenting this as a solution to the "casters are too complicated" complaint.
Literally, this is me saying "Caster Resource Husbandry is cool and useful and worthwhile, but the rest of Caster Resource Attrition isn't great. Is there any viable way to get the one without the other?"
Am... am I making sense here? I think that I'm being pretty clear, but....
...or is it just that everyone else is more interested in asserting their own proposals of "how to make casters awesome" than engaging with the topic I'm trying to engage with? Was it the thread name? Do I need to just be way more precise about my thread names?
Yes a caster running through a day that's 10+ Trivial/Low/Moderate encounters will feel like they're being forced to strain their resources, but a martial running through a day that is just 1-2 Severe/Extreme encounters will find that the caster's nova potential isn't just good to have it actually feels mandatory to help them clear the encounter.Don't really agree at all. Casters do better on shorter days, but unless the encounter is designed for it, I'd never describe it as feeling particularly mandatory.
Have you ever run with an all-martial party? There’s a reason pretty much every story you see online about an all-martial party involves a TPK, a GM who is purposely making encounters specialized for the all-martial party to win, or a party that’s playing at a super high level and has carefully picked out Archetypes to make sure they have all the coverage between that a caster would normally bring.
Likewise why do you think most discussions of “optimized” martial-heavy parties involve the assumption that you have a Bard applying as many buffs as possible and/or functioning as your pocket healer?
Severe and Extreme fights become very, very susceptible to randomness without a caster smoothing it all out. That is, in fact, the primary “role” of a caster (especially at higher levels): smoothing out randomness in the most difficult encounters by pumping spells into them.
IMO that's one of the key issues in terms of discrepancy here. A fighter on encounter 1/1 for a day is still going to hit hard, feel good, and deal extremely nice damage. You're not going to feel their stamina, but the class still functions excellently in a way that a wizard on encounter 12/15 never will.
I mean the obvious answer here is that a 15-encounter day in any reasonably designed adventure should be like 90% Trivial/Low encounters (which can be entirely resolved with cantrips, focus spells, and rank-3/lower spells) and/or be a more sandbox adventure style where the players can use tactics like bypassing, retreating, negotiating, chaining, etc to avoid as many encounters as possible.
The mythical 15-encounter adventuring day that’s also somehow consists of enough Moderate encounters to completely bleed the caster dry is a strawman in my experience. I’ve never seen an AP call for such a day, and if a GM disobeys the encounter balance rules and throws this at the party that’s… kind of a moot point isn’t it?
I mean, that's how we're here, right? Paizo said 3/day
But Paizo didn't say that, at least not anywhere visible. 3/day encounters is something buried in an online forum a tiny fraction of the player base will ever see, and even that only after years of people having no idea whatsoever what made sense (I never even saw someone come up with Paizo's target number in discussions on the forums before that).
The actual rulebooks and APs are basically silent on the topic.
So it's less people wanting more or less than the baseline than it is people having no reference point at all.
Players just sitting there on their seventh or eighth encounter spamming electric arc being miserable and just assuming that's just Paizo's vision for how a Wizard should be and deciding to never touch it again.
In terms of macro changes, it just genuinely seems like a bad idea to design a game that minimizes the impact of attrition and then design a class within that game that is specifically balanced around resource attrition. Either rethink spell slots or rethink the rest system....and, indeed, this is what I'm trying to do with this thread.
Is it me? Have I been unclear? Like, literally no one else in this discussion has addressed the issue as I presented it and asked for assistance on. Nobody. When you look around the room, and you're the weird one out....
I try, one more time, to explain the actual issue I'm trying to address.
- Caster Resource Attrition: this is the bit where, over the course of the average adventuring day, the standard caster will slowly run out of resources. I assert that this is bad, for reasons mostly centered on how it makes certain parts of the balance math ooky, and also provides perverse incentives. I would like to have casters that, over the average adventuring day, maintain a pretty even balance on resources spent vs resources gained.
- Caster Resource Husbanding: This is the bit where, in each individual encounter, a caster has decisions to make about how many resources they're going to spend on that encounter. This is the thing that lets them go heavier on the harder fights and lighter on the easier fights. I assert that this is good. It makes casters feel more like casters, and it's something that a notable chunk of the playerbase enjoys playing with.
In basically every game of this lineage I've played, the two have been completely inextricable from one another. Resource Husbandry has only every been achieved through a Resource Attrition mechanism. That is the thing I want to change. I want to let people play the Resource Husbandry game without the downsides that Resource Attrition brings with it.
As a side benefit, just about any way of doing this would also make the Resource Husbandry game more...
You don't seem to be understanding this caster resource problem only exists for certain classes.
Caster Resource Attrition as you call it doesn't affect all classes in the same way.
You do not feel as constrained on resources with easily replenished class abilities or all day usable ones.
A bard doesn't feel resource constrained because they have all day usable abilities between focus points and cantrips.
Even when I play sorcerer, I have focus spells for use and a lot of spells slots I can flexibly use as needed.
When I play a druid, I can use my focus spells all day. A focus spell like Untamed Form built with feats has a huge amount of utility usable all day.
So you're attempting to paint this picture of resource attrition when only certain classes suffer from this, primarily the wizard.
So how can you paint a problem that exists for only a single class and then expect a solution when the solution is already present and part of the other classes?
I mean, that's how we're here, right? Paizo said 3/dayBut Paizo didn't say that, at least not anywhere visible. 3/day encounters is something buried in an online forum a tiny fraction of the player base will ever see, and even that only after years of people having no idea whatsoever what made sense (I never even saw someone come up with Paizo's target number in discussions on the forums before that).
The actual rulebooks and APs are basically silent on the topic.
So it's less people wanting more or less than the baseline than it is people having no reference point at all.
Players just sitting there on their seventh or eighth encounter spamming electric arc being miserable and just assuming that's just Paizo's vision for how a Wizard should be and deciding to never touch it again.
What class has to spam electric arc?
Let me see. If I'm a druid, I'm using Tempest Surge or Untamed Form or the storm blast.
If I'm a sorcerer, I'm using one of my three focus spells.
If I'm a bard, I'm boosting with a song or other cantrip mixing them up as needed.
If I'm a psychic, I'm using an amped cantrip or some special cantrip that is actually pretty cool.
If I'm a witch, I'm using a hex or another focus spell I built up.
Now who does that leave using a Force bolt or some other garbage focus spell, then running out of slots and spamming my electric arc. Hmmmm. what class is that? I wonder.
You don't seem to be understanding this caster resource problem only exists for certain classes.
You do not feel as constrained on resources with easily replenished class abilities or all day usable ones.
A bard doesn't feel resource constrained because they have all day usable abilities between focus points and cantrips.
Even when I play sorcerer, I have focus spells for use and a lot of spells slots I can flexibly use as needed.
When I play a druid, I can use my focus spells all day. A focus spell like Untamed Form built with feats has a huge amount of utility usable all day.
So you're attempting to paint this picture of resource attrition when only certain classes suffer from this, primarily the wizard.
So how can you paint a problem that exists for only a single class and then expect a solution when the solution is already present and part of the other classes?
You don't seem to understand that the problem I'm trying to address is not the problem you think it is.
I'm trying to address a core underlying structural issue that has a number of implications, some of them fairly subtle. It sounds like it's not directly impacting your personal enjoyment of play, and that's great, but that just means that it's not an issue for you and your friends in the games that you play. You've reached a rough general "number of encounters per day" that works for you, you've developed a good understanding of the amount of resources to spend under various conditions, and your GMs are consistent enough in their patterns that those intuitions remain accurate. That's great! That's how it should be. I'm happy for you. That doesn't mean that the issue doesn't exist.
Your proposed solution is to ensure that all classes have interesting, fun, impactful powers that they can use all day long. Okay, sure... but that's like a lot of the other suggestions we've seen. It's not trying to separate Husbandry from Attrition. it's just making both of them less important. It makes Attrition problems less of an issue, but it does it by raising the floor to the point that it doesn't matter nearly as much whether or not you have enough slots, and you're less likely to run out of slots because there are fewer situations where you want/need to use them. That's effectively the watered-down version of the "make every caster a kineticist" arguments. I mean, if what people really want is the set dressing of spell slots while not having slot management actually be a thing, then I guess it achieves that, but that's not really the thing I was trying to address.
It's not about how much Attrition matters or should matter. That is an entirely different discussion. It's about trying to come up with a system where the Husbandry part of Attrition can exist as a meaningful thing, that you can't just handwave away, where people can and do plan around it, but where the downsides of the rest of Attrition aren't a thing. I'm hoping to come up with a system where budgeting out your spell slots matters (...and potentially matters a lot) but doesn't suck... regardless of how long the day gets
...and yeah. I'm willing to believe that your group has managed to square that circle. You all seem to be having a lot of fun. At the same time, the fact that it's possible to find a niche where the issue is basically handled (for most classes) doesn't mean that the problem doesn't exist or is unworthy of consideration. There are people out there who aren't finding those niches.
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I don't think that's possible, at least up to a certain point. The less of a role resource attrition plays, the less important husbanding those resources becomes. I suspect you are going to need to compromise on one end or the other, and that is inevitably going to alienate someone.
That being said, working within the limits you've been discussing, my current suggestion would be to have some mana pool or point system that refreshes every encounter. Make the pool large enough that a caster can cast lots of small spells if they like, or go big with a heavy-hitting spell or two, but not so large that they can go full bore with their top-level abilities each and every turn. Or, conversely, give them a large pool that can handle lots of heavy lifting, but put a limit on how many of those nova-style abilities they can employ in any given encounter. Give them a baseline to fall back on, such as the cantrips we have now which are OK but not amazing, so that a caster can do something even if their actual points are all expended, and I think you could get a lot of that attrition feel without needing to worry about daily encounters.
First of all, thank you for trying to meet me where I am. I appreciate that.
Second... I think there are ways to get the one without the other, and that the issue was that they were tricky and/or would have secondary effects that might need to be worked around and so forth. At the same time, I had also thought I'd laid out at least a general sketch of how they might be found or addressed, and your stated position seems to take as an assumed that they're indivisible.
Now, I'd only come up with one such way (very roughly), and I'd wanted to leave things a lot more open under the theory that other folks could come up with other ways, but if I far enough out in space that I need to plunge into implementation to even make myself comprehensible, then I guess this well-meaning alien will do just that.
At least in a general sense, I propose a system where casters have important resources that persist between encounters, that they will therefore wish to husband, but that they both consume and generate during encounters, such that the default average encounter is resource-neutral.
Further, they shouldn't start the day maxxed out on this stuff. Going to sleep for the night should return you to a baseline, but there should be plenty of space above the baseline for you to accumulate resources that you can later spend, if you're fighting conservatively.
This means that for a caster, the difference between a 1-encounter day and an 8-encounter day isn't nearly as big a deal, but they still get to have those fun decisions about how heavily to spend on any given fight... and they get to keep having those decisions all the way through the aforementioned 8-encounter day (or 12, or 16...)
Now, is this an easy thing to implement well? No. That's why I'm hoping for some help here - to figure out some of the traps before we step in them, and try to come up with something interesting and coherent that makes sense and could work.
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I mean, that's how we're here, right? Paizo said 3/dayBut Paizo didn't say that, at least not anywhere visible. 3/day encounters is something buried in an online forum a tiny fraction of the player base will ever see, and even that only after years of people having no idea whatsoever what made sense (I never even saw someone come up with Paizo's target number in discussions on the forums before that).
The actual rulebooks and APs are basically silent on the topic.
So it's less people wanting more or less than the baseline than it is people having no reference point at all.
Players just sitting there on their seventh or eighth encounter spamming electric arc being miserable and just assuming that's just Paizo's vision for how a Wizard should be and deciding to never touch it again.
You kinda just erased the context of their quote to make it mean something else entirely?
They were clearly saying that no matter N/day you tightly design around, you end up in a catch-22 where if you're not transparent about what N is, people accidentally run N+1 or N+2 or whatever, and if you are transparent, people say "why N"? Either way, it ends up not being unsatisfactory to someone or the other. They didn't say (or even imply, really) anything about the guidelines themselves mentioning this.
As for the rulebooks being "basically silent on the topic": they're not. Quoting with relevant emphasis added:
Trivial-threat encounters are so easy that the characters have essentially no chance of losing. They're unlikely to spend significant resources unless they're particularly wasteful. These encounters work best as warm-ups, palate cleansers, or reminders of how awesome the characters are. A trivial-threat encounter can still be fun to play, so don't ignore them just because of the lack of challenge.Low-threat encounters present a veneer of difficulty and typically use some of the party's resources. However, it would be rare or the result of very poor tactics for the entire party to be seriously endangered.
Moderate-threat encounters are a serious challenge to the characters, though unlikely to overpower them completely. Characters usually need to use sound tactics and manage their resources wisely to come out of a moderate-threat encounter ready to continue on and face a harder challenge without resting.
Severe-threat encounters are the hardest encounters most groups of characters have a good chance to defeat. These encounters are appropriate for important moments in your story, such as confronting a final boss. Use severe encounters carefully—there's a good chance a character could die, and a small chance the whole group could. Bad luck, poor tactics, or a lack of resources can easily turn a severe-threat encounter against the characters, and a wise group keeps the option to disengage open.
Extreme-threat encounters are so dangerous that they are likely to be an even match for the characters, particularly if the characters are low on resources. This makes them too challenging for most uses! Use an extreme encounter only if you're willing to take the chance the entire party will die. An extreme-threat encounter might be appropriate for a fully rested group of characters that can go all-out, for the climactic encounter at the end of an entire campaign, or for a group of veteran players using advanced tactics and teamwork.
Reading the rules should make it extremely clear that Severe/Extreme should only be used on parties that nearly full up on resources, and Trivial/Low is what you use if you wanna throw 5 or 15 or whatever encounters in a very short timespan. Moderate is a bit hazy, but pretty much every AP (aside from that first year of blatantly overtuned APs) and GM I have seen since before Sayre said "3/day" explicitly stuck more or less to "enough to not run a caster out of top rank slots" which ends up being... roughly 3 per day.
Also note that there's a reason the guidelines tell you that the players should keep the option open to retreat rather than encouraging GMs to overdesign their adventuring day around their players. The idea is that adventures should be designed in a more organic way where, outside of specific time constraints, a party should always have enough agency to just rest when they feel like they need to.
That's why they don't explicitly say 3 per day or something like that. The goal is to move away from a "combat as sport" mentality where the day is tightly designed for the players to succeed, and move towards a paradigm where players' in-universe goals and meta-knowledge inform how long the adventuring day needs to be. When I GM in my relatively sandboxy campaign I just... don't set an adventuring day. I balance areas and individual encounters, and my players figure out how to make that day something they can approach (and obviously there's the implicit assumption that I will not just throw back to back Extremes at them).
As Sayre has mentioned before, the 3/day guidelines are for struggling GMs who aren't being enabled by the rules, not for the majority of the GMs whose players rest when they want to (notice that most APs don't have a severe time constraint for this exact reason).
You don't seem to be understanding this caster resource problem only exists for certain classes.
You do not feel as constrained on resources with easily replenished class abilities or all day usable ones.
A bard doesn't feel resource constrained because they have all day usable abilities between focus points and cantrips.
Even when I play sorcerer, I have focus spells for use and a lot of spells slots I can flexibly use as needed.
When I play a druid, I can use my focus spells all day. A focus spell like Untamed Form built with feats has a huge amount of utility usable all day.
So you're attempting to paint this picture of resource attrition when only certain classes suffer from this, primarily the wizard.
So how can you paint a problem that exists for only a single class and then expect a solution when the solution is already present and part of the other classes?
You don't seem to understand that the problem I'm trying to address is not the problem you think it is.
I'm trying to address a core underlying structural issue that has a number of implications, some of them fairly subtle. It sounds like it's not directly impacting your personal enjoyment of play, and that's great, but that just means that it's not an issue for you and your friends in the games that you play. You've reached a rough general "number of encounters per day" that works for you, you've developed a good understanding of the amount of resources to spend under various conditions, and your GMs are consistent enough in their patterns that those intuitions remain accurate. That's great! That's how it should be. I'm happy for you. That doesn't mean that the issue doesn't exist.
Your proposed solution is to ensure that all classes have interesting, fun, impactful powers that they can use all day long. Okay, sure... but that's like a lot of the other suggestions we've seen. It's not trying to separate Husbandry from Attrition. it's just making both of them less...
I understand what your looking for fine. Not sure why you think I don't. What I'm trying to illustrate is the problem you state only exists for one caster. Just the one.
We haven't squared the circle with the wizard.
I do not believe there is a general problem with casters. You are creating an issue that doesn't exist for the majority of the casters. I think that wizard players continue to use the generic term for casters when they mean wizards.
This gets confounded by the posters who argue wizards are fine like Unicore versus the folks like myself who think wizards are not fine, they are severely lacking and boring in PF2.
I've illustrated many times the comparative problem of wizards and its a problem of layers coupled with a boring, underdeveloped class chassis.
I have no idea why some posters keep posting "casters are weak" when you see very few threads by any casters other than wizards. In my own experience with my players which contrary to some posters are not all that different from most players: they want classes to be fun to play.
Most of the casters in PF2 are fun to play due to innate class abilities other than spell slots. Spell slots are only one aspect of very class except one...the wizard is almost entirely built on spell slots.
It's why even their proponents are always claiming the class is fine due to the advantage on spell slots and lots of extra casting with scrolls the level 8 or 10 free scroll feat and stacking more high level slots with Spell Blending.
The entire discussion around wizards revolves around spell slots because they have nothing else to talk about.
I know you're trying to help. This problem needs to be focused where Paizo can action it in my opinion. They have to be shown the real play problems and real, viable fixes for the future.
I think they have those solutions in hand because some of their casters that are not as dependent on a limited daily resource like slots work just fine and make people feel great playing them unless they don't like the base concept.
I do agree with Deriven that the Wizard is sort of undercooked, in that it doesn't have a compelling through-line besides "10 level of spell casting" a thing that isn't really true about the Bard, Cleric, Witch, Sorcerer, Psychic, Druid, Oracle, and presumably Animist. Given the choice I would pretty much always prefer to play one of those classes instead of the Wizard, and many of those classes are quite strong in PF2 as is.
So it feels like we've mostly had a missed opportunity in the remaster to not zhuzh up the wizard enough in that the basic problem with the Wizard is "none of its class features or feats are all that fun or interesting compared to similar options other classes get." Some of this is because Intelligence is already one of the weaker stats in terms of the support it gets, but the remastered Witch is pretty good.
But that being said, if there's one class I'm comfortable with being the "weakest class" or the "most boring class" in a version of this family of games, it's the Wizard.
You kinda just erased the context of their quote to make it mean something else entirely?
No, I was putting emphasis on the part of the post I had a problem with. You can't say people are flouting the guidelines or pushing the needle too much when Paizo has done such a poor job communicating those positions in the first place. It's sort of a shame you feel the need to lead with the bad faith, especially when you seem to have so much to actually say on the topic.
The goal is to move away from a "combat as sport" mentality where the day is tightly designed for the players to succeed, and move towards a paradigm where players' in-universe goals and meta-knowledge inform how long the adventuring day needs to be.
And that's a commendable one, but also fundamentally at odds with using attrition as a form of game balance (but only for a couple specific classes). Hence... this whole issue.
You kinda just erased the context of their quote to make it mean something else entirely?No, I was putting emphasis on the part of the post I had a problem with. You can't say people are flouting the guidelines or pushing the needle too much when Paizo has done such a poor job communicating those positions in the first place. It's sort of a shame you feel the need to lead with the bad faith, especially when you seem to have so much to actually say on the topic.
I was not trying to lead with bad faith, and in fact I still think you are misinterpreting their point. I am pretty sure they are not saying that the community is flouting their guidelines or anything like that, they are literally just saying that whatever baseline Paizo used it would be a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.
The goal is to move away from a "combat as sport" mentality where the day is tightly designed for the players to succeed, and move towards a paradigm where players' in-universe goals and meta-knowledge inform how long the adventuring day needs to be.And that's a commendable one, but also fundamentally at odds with using attrition as a form of game balance (but only for a couple specific classes). Hence... this whole issue.
I don't really agree with the idea that a combat as war mentality is at odds with having attrition as part of your design constraints. In fact I would argue attrition needs to exist for that mentality to come into consideration in the first place?
Like I stated that the guidelines are designed so the GM can design the upper end (6+ Trivial/Low encounters) and lower end (1-2 Severe or exactly 1 Extreme encounter) of attrition accurately, but for everything in between the players should make their decision on when their adventuring day ends (and the GM should general design the story to make that true). How would that even happen if there were no classes with attrition? Surely you'd need some kind of attrition to encourage the resting?
This also got thoroughly playtested in the MCDM TTRPG incidentally. They found that removing attrition meant that parties would just keep on adventuring and there was little reason to stop to rest. There was also some other revelation about a "5-minute adventuring day" style problem with the system's pseudo-resources that built up over the course of several combat. They ended up having to fix all that by limiting HP for everyone at the end.
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The first trap I immediately see is this.
Further, they shouldn't start the day maxxed out on this stuff. Going to sleep for the night should return you to a baseline, but there should be plenty of space above the baseline for you to accumulate resources that you can later spend, if you're fighting conservatively.This concept being part of the system is going to encourage conservative play. (To be clear, I'm not saying that sort of play is incorrect, but it does seem to be a style of play you're trying to get away from.) Look at gold, and specifically consumables, as a current example, or heck, even spell slots under the current paradigm. Folks are always talking about keeping all their consumables so they can sell them all later and get one better thing in some future point, and there is also the concern over spending your highest level slots because, well, what if there is a more dangerous fight later you don't know about? If there is a way to gather resources to be above a baseline so you can have a big turn, then people are going to hoard those resources to have that big turn, and there is going to be friction. That's where the fifteen minute adventuring day comes from in the first place, no?
If you have a system that requires generating and spending a resource, and allowing that resource to be stockpiled, then the natural inclination is to find ways to generate as much as possible, while spending as little as possible, and getting to that zenith stockpile as quickly and as often as possible. That's why I see attrition and husbandry as indivisible. Any form of resources going down is going to encourage some behaviors that try to keep that from happening. We saw similar kinds of behaviors with hit points and wands of cure light wounds in the previous edition; people hoarded as many as they could because it was the most effective way of keeping that resource from depleting. It was the most effective way to husband that resource between encounters.
That mentality is different in PF2E, because PF2E has implemented rules that expect that resource to be filled between encounters, or at least, nearly filled. That's sort of what I'm proposing here. Your maximum pool of power is considered your baseline, and it's relatively easy to return to that baseline after any given encounter; daily attrition is essentially a non-factor because encounter attrition is king.
So... various reactions
As you say, this already exists in the current game. I accept that. I'm also not particularly trying to wipe out conservative play, or at least not entirely. The people who are particularly bad at it... tend not to play casters. I know that I personally avoid casters because I have this issue, and it makes the primary gameplay loop uncomfortable for me. At the same time, I expect that the assurance that more is available later, and the sort of "suggested budget" of your per-encounter income, should moderate those issues.
Still, yes. It's going to mean that people probably play a little conservative and try to build up resources over the course of the day just in case. That's true. That's part of what the resource husbandry game is.
The problem of the fifteen minute adventuring day comes from the fact that going to sleep fills you back up again on all of those shiny temporary resources. So, the caster wakes up, they head into their first fight, they blow all of their most important resources and get to feel super-awesome about it... and then they start complaining that they need to go back home and rest because they don't have any more of the really good spells. That's the fifteen-minute adventuring day. This one avoids that pretty handily. It starts you out with a bit in the tank, but it's actually to the caster's advantage to have a few encounters before the big boss, so they can go in with more of a full tank than they started the day with. Fifteen minute adventuring day isn't nearly so much of an issue with this one.
The "people will play silly games for stockpiling advantages" is an issue. That's true. I believe that it's one that can be overcome with proper implementation, though. That's part of why I came up with the idea of having it be dependent on the challenge level of the encounter, hitting at the time you roll initiative. We don't want it to be anything that you can do out of combat, because then people will just sit and spin in relative safety. We don't want it to be anything that people can do in combat, because they'll beat the enemy down to the "no real threat" level and then sit and spin in relative safety. Thus, the two obvious times to do it are as a charge-up at the start of battle or as a reward at the end, and scaling it to the level of threat seems like a bonus as well.
Now, can this be cheesed? Probably. In particular, it seems like a situation where you might want another rule that caused you to lose charge if you ran away. It's also something that might be a bit tricky to fit into the world thematically. It's a work in progress, and it hasn't progressed all that far as yet. Still, from what I can see, something like that could work.
I understand what your looking for fine. Not sure why you think I don't. What I'm trying to illustrate is the problem you state only exists for one caster. Just the one.
We haven't squared the circle with the wizard.
The reason that I don't think you understand is that the issue I'm trying to address is almost entirely agnostic of the specifics of the classes involved. It's even largely agnostic to the overall comparative strength between casters and martials.
The fact that you're trying to talk about the details of specific classes as anything other than brief illustrative examples means that, regardless of what you might think, we're not actually talking about the same problem. You think that I'm proposing the thing that I'm proposing in order to fix a specific issue that you're aware of and dislike, or in response to specific complaints made by others. I'm not. I'm proposing to fix this thing because it is a problem in and of itself, mostly for the second and third order effects that it generates, and the whole wizard thing is just the expression of those effects that happens to be most visible and frustrating to you.
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A bit late to the party but I have a few thoughts:
* Absolutely agree that this is a great time to be talking about PF3 - and agree that, given the intrinsic elegance of the core system AND the Remaster, it could be a while off. But better to be thinking about it and discussing it well beforehand.
* I think Deriven’s points (made in this and other threads) about the useful delineation of “most/all other casters” and “wizards” should be taken into account. Given the lack of meaningful other resources for the wizard to fall back on or otherwise rely on.
* I wonder if the “resource management” of casters and wizards is…part of the package and that navigating the “adventuring day” with a mixed bag of martials and casters and wizards is a sub-game some people either navigate easily/don’t tacitly worry about and for others it is a pain point. Perhaps it could have easier more GM-navigable “toggles” to cater to different parties/playstyles. I mean I’m sure there are in terms of different threat levels but perhaps something a little more user friendly would help. I guess my point here is that it might be useful to find out if a) the devs are concerned about this as an issue and b) even if they do, how much of an issue, and how much of their resources are they willing to apportion to remediating it (partially or fully) alongside any other changes in a new edition. Sort of like a scope analysis perhaps - because it feels like it might affect…a lot of things.
*@Sanityfaerie - you mentioned “something in the loot pool”. In a long forgotten time ago in a campaign that never got off the ground in an edition so dusty it is very very seldom played, I toyed with the idea of magic crystals that would essentially recharge spent spell slots. Or, that would even replace spell slots entirely and thus casters could *only* cast spells powered by whatever crystals they had on hand, with different level/color crystals powering certain level spells, possibly combining crystals like a weird math/elementary building block concept.
Understand I’m not much of a caster fan (see my wish for “no-magic in Starfinder” book request) and such a system might a) be a massive departure from “slots” etc, and b) send what you are asking for in the complete opposite direction (and be roundly hated by the player base!), but I felt it was tangentially related to “husbandry”.
In terms of macro changes, it just genuinely seems like a bad idea to design a game that minimizes the impact of attrition and then design a class within that game that is specifically balanced around resource attrition. Either rethink spell slots or rethink the rest system....and, indeed, this is what I'm trying to do with this thread.
Is it me? Have I been unclear? Like, literally no one else in this discussion has addressed the issue as I presented it and asked for assistance on. Nobody. When you look around the room, and you're the weird one out....
I try, one more time, to explain the actual issue I'm trying to address.
I kind of feel like I did in the second half of my post, but I guess that wasn't what you're looking for?
I don't really agree with the idea that a combat as war mentality is at odds with having attrition as part of your design constraints. In fact I would argue attrition needs to exist for that mentality to come into consideration in the first place?
I might have phrased it wrong. It's not that combat as war, or combat as a vehicle for storytelling is at odds with attrition.
I believe it's at odds with how selective that attrition is, which makes certain classes overly sensitive to changes in encounter structure that should be narratively, not mechanically driven.
If I give my players reason to tax themselves and push on into longer adventuring days, it's the party Wizard who's going to have a really bad time, while the Barbarian hardly cares... and even other spellcasters like the Psychic or Druid can continue to operate pretty effectively for much longer... if the latter three get regular short breaks to refocus and heal they can continue almost indefinitely (though it's worth pointing out that psychics have the opposite problem and turn pretty miserable if they can't get those refocus windows).
It's not that I think attrition is inherently bad, but that if I create a higher-attrition environment, it's often one specific party member that feels the strain while others are only marginally affected, which both undermines how much the attrition is felt and can lead to that one player feeling stuck or having a uniquely unfun experience.
That's also why I think something as simple as more consistent focus spell design would go a long way to alleviating the problem, because having those reliable fallback options stabilizes classes significantly.
I kind of feel like I did in the second half of my post, but I guess that wasn't what you're looking for?
It's fair. You didn't ignore it entirely. At the same time, the "MP vs Spell Slots" question is very nearly orthogonal to the question of when and how your resources refresh.
@OceanshieldwolPF 2.5 - just wanted to say that I see your post, and it is worthy of response, and I just do not have the time right now. I'll try to get to it later.
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Out of all the people to have responded to this thread, literally only two so far have bothered to directly broach the OP's suggestion. Disappointing, but not entirely unsurprising given the tendency for the same few people on these forums to constantly descend into pointless bickering and ignore what others have to say. Let's bring that number up to three:
So... the clearest answer that I see is to have some sort of resource that the caster can build up or spend down in encounters, that lasts at least as long as an adventuring day. Wake up int he morning with a decent supply of this stuff, but not a full tank, and then let you build up by going low-power or really unleash for the stronger stuff.
So, to me this hits a snag, which is: what if there's only one encounter in the day? What if there's only one encounter every day? The design problem mentioned in the OP, which I agree with, is that casters' spell slots are balanced around the expectation of a certain amount of challenge in a day that cost resources, and the issue I see with this particular suggestion is that it still makes that same assumption, albeit in slightly different form. Being able to recover a resource across encounters to lead up to high moments is great... assuming you get to that encounter where you have that high moment. If you don't, then you'd miss out on a major part of what would make casters awesome. For this reason, while I do support giving casters a limited means of outputting exceptional power alongside less powerful effects, I also feel it's important for that resource expenditure to cycle with each encounter, rather than across encounters in a session of indeterminate length.
If we're talking PF3e, a blank slate for us to design classes anew, I think the approach that could help the above would be to make magic feat-based by default, which would allow casters to access powerful effects balanced around being used at-will. However, the OP also makes a good point about players enjoying and expecting some variance out of caster classes, and I think we also have an answer that can be found in 2e already, in the form of focus spells: focus spells are a limited resource that are refreshed in-between every encounter, so you can have those limited high moments but also not worry about how many encounters will happen in a day. As a bonus, if focus spells represent the height of power you can output, then a caster's most powerful tools could also be the ones unique to their class, or subclass. If three Focus Points would represent too much availability, then capping the resource to two or even just one would make sure it'd feel like a limited, yet explosive burst of power.
If we're talking about developing content for 2e, things would get more complicated, because focus spells are weaker than slot spells. My personal take would be to have an archetype that condenses spell slots down to an extremely limited number of extra-special, max-rank (up to 9th) spell slots that'd recharge by Refocusing, just like Focus Points, in exchange for a severe reduction to spells known or prepared. This'd provide more consistency across an adventuring day in exchange for versatility, while still allowing casters to also use focus spells alongside slot spells. The main risk I think would be with out-of-combat spells, which would effectively become resourceless for all intents and purposes. That much can be fine if being able to use spells at-will outside of combat is the benchmark for balancing that archetype, but it does mean that as soon as a caster can learn or prepare a spell, they'd be able to spam it outside of encounters.
Notably, 1-4 encounters per day also appears to be the consensus in the larger playerbase. So I'm not sure the problem of extremely long adventuring days is worth solving, from the perspective of possibly breaking something else, especially since it can broadly be mitigated for the relatively few tables that play that way via higher-than-usual access to at level wands and such.
If the expectation is to cast a top-rank spell for every (non-trivial) encounter, then a solution could be exactly that: you have a top-rank spell that you can recharge between encounters, like you do with focus points. Or more likely, one spell per rank. But if you want to cast more than one, you start eating into a limited and non-rechargeable resource that is then gone for the day.
There, you have both resource management and durability (if you can rest for a bit). And this still offers room for some distinction between prepared and spontaneous spellcasting.
So... the clearest answer that I see is to have some sort of resource that the caster can build up or spend down in encounters, that lasts at least as long as an adventuring day. Wake up int he morning with a decent supply of this stuff, but not a full tank, and then let you build up by going low-power or really unleash for the stronger stuff.Of course, this has some weirdness of its own. In particular, it means that low-risk encounters actually give resources to the party. This has obvious bag-of-rats cheese issues, but those at least have well-known solutions. The weirder thing is that it does this on intended encounters as well. Like, suddenly, if you toss a few easy goblin encounters between the party and the big bad, they're likely to be walking into that big bad fight with more resources, rather than less. That gets a little odd.
In many cases, it also gives the players reason to want to drag their fights out. Like, if casters are regenerating magic fuel by blasting with cantrips, then once you've beaten the enemy down tot he point where they're not much of a threat, the thing you really want to do is disable them as much as possible, and let the casters chip away at them with those cantrips until they finally keep over and die. You might even want to heal them a few times, if the economy of ti works out right.
Rereading this reminded me that this is actually identical to a problem the MCDM TTRPG went through during the playtest.
https://youtu.be/FQmrJYQFO4E?si=8i_1TdgP4W4o6sHD
Around 4 mins is when they describe the issue and around 7:30 is when they start describing the solution.
The gist is that the RPG’s design initially had no daily resources, only resources that built up as you fought encounters throughout the day. This incentivized players to drag battles out like you described. The solution was threefold:
1. Resources that were stockpiled up during combat disappeared at the end of combat, so there was no incentive to drag out an already won combat.
2. Every victorious combat gave you a higher floor for your resource building to start during the next combat. This gave incentive for parties to keep pushing on instead of going for a 5-minute adventuring day.
3. All healing in the game, whether via mundane means or magical and whatever resource it keys off in-combat, is now tied to a daily resource that is limited (like if every character had a max to how much healing they can receive in a day). This means that there’s still an upper limit to how long you can go, there’s no benefit to dragging out combat to use temporary resources for extra healing, and tactical play to preserve HP pools is still rewarded because you can go for longer if you do that.
So in the end the game still needs some form of attrition just to make some sense I think.
Now how can we adapt these lessons to what you’re suggesting for Pathfinder? What if:
- All characters, whether spellcaster or not, have a maximum to healing they can receive per day. Maybe just to out of combat healing a la 5E’s Short Rests or 4E’s Healing Surges, or maybe to healing spells and items too.
- Spellcasters can convert their HP into spell slots (or mana points or whatever form of magic fuel the system uses) between encounters to stay relevant.
- The rest of the math is rebalanced around this. In particular I think NPC damage would need to be slightly reduced, and focus spells would need a substantial nerf to make this reasonable.
What do you think of that?
This is about 4% of a useful idea - anyone remember the Dark Millennium system for psykers in Warhammer 40,000?
Spells(powers) cost 1-3 force cards to cast, and each turn you'd deal nd6 cards where n was the number of psykers(casters) in the fight. The effect was that in smaller fights a psyker got a trickle of power and couldn't blow everything up unless the deal was really lucky, and in a huge fight there was boatloads of force available and everybody could cut loose.
In theory, "fight size" is already handled; every encounter is trivial, extreme or whatever. What if caster power scaled with that somehow? As an elementary example I've given about two seconds of thought, what if casters got one "unit of spell power" to use in a trivial fight, two in a low fight, et cetera, up to five in an extreme fight? Assuming the numbers were brilliantly chosen you wouldn't have "conservation" fights and "nova" fights; in every fight you'd have roughly-enough power to call on and it would be up to you to get as much value out of it as you could.
(Lore-wise, this was easy to explain in 40k because conflict and death stir up the Warp and the Warp is where psykers' power comes from. I feel like that general idea could be copy-pasted, even if we admitted that the mechanic's real raison d'etre was to help with power allocation.)
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Some unique way for wizards to amp spells using focus points would definitely help that class much more than a weak focus spell that barely gets used.
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Idk, kineticist has been wildly successful as a class. I think the general population of gamers (and their average age range) is so far removed from the foundational inspirations of DND that we can do the feat based casters in a new edition and not repeat the grognard teeth knashing of old (provided a pf3e doesnt repeat the OTHER shortcomings of DnD4e). It really seems like the easiest most readily believable alternative to the spell slots system. The generalist will suffer the most in a paradigm where casters only have access to 15-20 abilities but *shrug* focused themes are cooler than toolboxes. Wizard specifically is the only character concept that is greatly hindered, a small price to pay for all casters functioning smoother