Well, here's my pitch for something that would work in PF2.
Casters start with 2/3 or so of their slots. Everyone gets the following basic actions.
Reclaim Magic [Manipulate, Concentrate]
1 to 3 actions
Choose a spell you cast from a spell slot since the start of your last turn or choose a spell you cast from a spell slot that has a duration and that hasn't expired yet. Make a check using the appropriate skill (Arcana for an arcane spell, etc) or your spell attack modifier against the level-based DC for the spell's rank. If you spent three actions, reduce the DC by 5. If you spent one action, increase the DC by 5 and any spells you cast from spell slots this turn are disrupted. If you have already cast a spell from a slot this turn, you can't use a 1 action Reclaim Magic. You can't Reclaim Magic multiple times from the same spell.
>Crit Success: Gain spell points equal to half the spell's rank, rounded down to a minimum of 1. Then you choose to either make the spell slot you cast the chosen spell from unexpended as if you had not cast from it or you gain spell points equal to the spell's rank.
>Success: Gain spell points equal to the spell's rank.
>Failure: Gain spell points equal to the rank of the spell minus 1, to a minimum of 1.
>Crit Failure: Gain spell points equal to half the rank of the spell, rounded down to a minimum of 0.
In stressful situations, such as in combat or high-stakes social interactions, ambient chaos makes spellcasting more erratic and prone to generating excess energy. Outside of those situations, because there is less energy to reclaim, reduce your degree of success by one.
Channel Magic
10 minutes
Expend any number of spell points. Fill spell slots with total ranks equal to the spell points expended. If you prepare spells, prepare filled slots as you would during daily preparations.
The basic premise is that in an easy fight you don't have to go hard with spells, so if you throw a slotted spell you can take a turn off to potentially turn that slot into a higher rank slot. Once you have a few levels you can even upgrade lower rank slots with single actions while still dropping focus spells, cantrips, or spells from items. In hard fights you can't build up your resource because you will be too busy dropping slotted spells. This system also adds pseudo-Spell Substitution to all prepared casters since they would suffer the most from not starting with their full array of slots.
I really do not see any system where casters start the day at anything less 100% working in pf3.
Casting spells outside combat is just too fundamental to the concept, so that must be possible. Furthermore, any "why can I *only* do this in combat" issue must not be there.
Basically, if you can come up with a reason for players to PvP and slap each other to "charge up" before opening the door, the design is a fail.
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To be honest, the concept of spending completely dead actions in combat trying to regain spells is in my view a nightmare scenario of design.
Any system that involves using combat actions to recharge / charge any kind of resource or effect **must not** incentivize players to "leave the last foe alive" in order to gain more daily resources by dragging out fights. Meaning, no resources that can be gained by combat actions can be allowed to persist beyond combat as daily resources. In other words, if you build some sort of points during combat, they *must* fade / reset once combat ends.
And, as we have established that casting spells outside combat is a requirement, there still needs be a slow-refilling, daily resource to the expending of spells.
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IMO, that's why pf3 casting will/should be designed around a core of time-only recharging FP, with the specific classes potentially supplementing FP w/ combat resetting class resource points.
When you see the clear need for that divide, it makes it easy to understand how play-breaking any baseline ability to regain FP in combat would become.
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As such, "resource neutral" combat should be based around a steady spell power output that recharges roughly at the speed of expected encounters p hours. "Resource positive" combat would be only casting the 0 FP cantrip versions and whatever is enabled by the specific spellcasting class.
With the "everything is a cantrip unless you spend FP" method, the slow refill could mean recharging 3 FP every 10 min after combat, or perhaps with no more need for dedicated refocusing, 1 FP per 10 min could still be fast enough replenishment.
There still must be balance / tension resulting from the story/scenario based desires to hurry to the next encounter and the burden that places on FP recharging, and consequently the combat use of FP. If there is no worry about refilling to cap between combats, that is a fail. And if the desire to conserve and wait between fights is too disruptive, that's the other fail.
Casters can't start not at full power...
I disagree. A caster starting at 75% power or so should be able to effectively engage with even an extreme threat encounter because, unless that encounter goes quite long, the caster won't spend all their slots. If they are low level they might be at risk of that, but extreme encounters at low level are already discouraged. If the caster hits a moderate/low threat encounter to start with then they can start building power immediately, which they couldn't if they started with full slots. All that said, starting at full power would also work with the system.
Can't cast outside of combat...
Utility casting outside of encounters needs to have a cost, and this system makes it so there is a limited cost. Limited, because you probably break even on those casts slot-wise, but it costs you 10 minutes per cast to do so if you want to keep those slots ready.
Objection to only in combat functionality...
As my original post said, it's not only in combat. Breaking positive is only in stressful/chaotic scenarios and the narrative reason is given. "Only in certain scenarios" functionalities are fine if a suitable narrative reason is given, but providing one would require more than the space in an action text. Even then, it is magic and magic is a place where sometimes a wizard just has to say that "that's how it works". Y'know, like every magic system.
Warmup PVP...
Not stressful/chaotic, unless of course there is some underlying drama and the characters aren't pulling their punches on each other allowing for risk of serious harm/death. Training and actually doing are different things. This also doesn't work if you treat your game as having a narrative element, because as it turns out, unless your party is a group of sadistic and masochistic villains that want to try and kill each other every morning for power, fireballing your fighter in the morning will lead to problems immediately. Which will make the situation become stressful/chaotic, but will also make your wizard (or fighter) dead.
Leave last foe alive...
See warm-up PVP, unless of course the last remaining goblin is in fact a threat to the party, at which point that is what we call managed risk on the players' part. Fireballing rabbits isn't stressful, fireballing a straw dummy isn't stressful, fireballing a level-3 goblin who is paralyzed and held down by your martials isn't stressful (unless you have moral qualms about torturing something to death, at which point maybe you wouldn't do that).
Dead combat actions...
I don't see how it is really that different from taking the Aid action or other numerical buffing action. The difference is the time frame we are looking at for the action investment to potentially payoff. That said, I am perfectly willing to admit that the balance could be wildly off between the various action costs and allowing for better economy on the spell recovery could be correct.
The reason I tie the resource recovery to the resource use, and make the "combat" version more powerful, is that this puts the spellcaster in control of getting their resources back while ensuring there is some risk still involved. This system allows a caster to always start fights with a big spell, then by turn two they should know if they need to throw another one or if they can start building resources.
There are multiple reasons I think using in-world time as the resource recovery method isn't a good solution.
To start with, it is the system we have right now. The period of time is 1 day, and the recovery amount is everything. Different timed recovery systems are just changing the interval and amount per interval.
It does not solve the 15-minute adventuring day. It just means that you do shifts, one when you start full power and one when you have recovered to full power. If you make the recovery period short, as in get back a spell every y minutes, then you just wait y * (number of top slots minutes) between encounters. Now instead of "we need to long rest, Wiz has no spells", it's "we need to wait, Wiz has no spells". You still have a group of martials playing cards while they wait for their wizard to be useful again, it's just a matter of how long they wait.
The resource management isn't in the wizard's control, it is in the gamemaster's. If the GM provides no time pressure, the resource game is just "dump spells, wait a while". With time pressure, the wizard in a fight does not want to spend his resource because he can't ensure he can have that resource available when he /really/ needs it. The reward for spending his resource, unless it was absolutely crucial for victory, is the party spends less time healing up (assuming something like the PF2 system for healing). But that reward immediately turns into a punishment because now the rest of the party wants to move on faster, while the wizard wants to wait longer. Unless you make the wizard's resource come back fast enough that this isn't an issue, but then we go back to "dump spells, wait" without the "wait". At that point you just have encounter powers with extra steps, which means you aren't playing a resource game at all.
Perhaps my biggest reason to dislike a timed recovery system is that it is all about avoiding casting spells. I don't play a caster to try not to cast spells, I want to cast spells and be rewarded for doing so.
My actual hope is that they keep vancian casting for the next edition of the game, but iterate on focus spells to make them more plentiful. I want them to more firmly fill the role of 4e style encounter powers (but work the way they do in the remaster), and I want every class to be able to get them.
What if spell slots were the unique mechanic of wizards?
The arcane spell list was theirs alone.
Sorry to be blunt, but any design where the GM has to turn on/off mechanics "because that last goblin is no longer a threat" is completely dead on arrival.
That is just outright not a viable game design, sorry.
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Perhaps my biggest reason to dislike a timed recovery system is that it is all about avoiding casting spells. I don't play a caster to try not to cast spells, I want to cast spells and be rewarded for doing so.
Again, all spells would become infinite cantrips castable w/ 0 FP.
If you personally desire a spellcaster that grows in power during combat, there easily could be a class built around that theme, where the class specific resource only grows as you land spells, such as gaining a cumulative bonus to spell damage with each spell that connects.
There's countless ways to reach a desired fantasy.
But, for the sake of a game system, there are plenty of limits to what can be done for a core foundation of what would be the base spellcasting.
Again, we are not talking about your ideal caster, but the baseline mechanics that would be inherited by every list spellcastering class. It needs to be as rock solid w/ no edge case abuse, generic, and usable as a blank check to build upon.
And btw, the 15-minute day, while already a grossly exaggerated concern, is discouraged by having the base FP pool be larger than the expected spend in a single fight. With any form of limited slots, once the slot is burned, it's gone for the day. Boosting infinite spells with a replenishing resource genuinely enables full recharging.
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While there's an infinite number of ways to build a thing, looking at the hard requirements can greatly help evaluate and simplify potential solutions.
* Need to be able to cast spells all day --> all spells can be cast infinitely w/ 0 FP as "cantrip versions".
* Need a way to tactically unleash stronger spells --> spells heighten with FP spend
* Need a resource that stretches between fights to encourage resource management --> total FP pool is bigger than 1 fight's spend, expected between fight time is -not- enough for full FP recovery.
That's the baseline foundation, which could be seriously remixed based on specific classes.
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"Gets stronger the more spells they cast" really sounds like a specific class mechanic, not an inherent feature of the pf3 spellcasting system.
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Ignoring my next post a moment, I think giving martials an attrition-able resource is better than pursuing the endless adventuring day. I like the Stamina optional rules for this, though I have layered a bunch of homebrew onto the Stamina rules when I use them since I find the base rules a bit underdeveloped.
... and ....
There are multiple reasons I think using in-world time as the resource recovery method isn't a good solution.
To start with, it is the system we have right now. The period of time is 1 day, and the recovery amount is everything. Different timed recovery systems are just changing the interval and amount per interval.
It does not solve the 15-minute adventuring day. It just means that you do shifts, one when you start full power and one when you have recovered to full power. If you make the recovery period short, as in get back a spell every y minutes, then you just wait y * (number of top slots minutes) between encounters. Now instead of "we need to long rest, Wiz has no spells", it's "we need to wait, Wiz has no spells". You still have a group of martials playing cards while they wait for their wizard to be useful again, it's just a matter of how long they wait.
I agree with some of what you say but not all of it.
I do think shorter recovery intervals for some resources are good. Yes, the wizard is sitting back after the encounter to regain... focus points? So is the psychic. Meanwhile the cleric is doing some Treat Wounds. The fighter isn't complaining that he has to wait on the wizard, because he's the one getting his wounds treated.
The game has a lot of "things to do in 10 minutes" put into it. As a GM you can let people have multiple 10m rests in between encounters and let them completely recover HP and focus. Or you can put encounters only say, 10m apart, so people have recovered a bit but not completely. This I think is working very well, it's a way to have some of the excitement that you get from being in a dangerous place where it's not safe to loiter.
The weird thing is that some classes are almost entirely on the 10m scale recovery schedule (martials), some are halfway (casters that also have good focus spells), and some are almost totally on the daily recovery schedule (wizards, because they don't have cool focus spells).
I think the ideal outcome would be that all classes are moved a bit in the direction of the happy middle.
- Move some of the emphasis from spell slots to focus spells. Wizard focus spells need to catch up a lot. Other casters are close to where they need to be already.
- Starting focus pool maybe at 2, and recover 2 per minute, with growth a bit higher. The more focus people get, the fewer spell slots are needed.
- Martials get some extraordinary things that they can do a limited amount of times per day too. There's already several feats like that - like not getting Wounded the first time you get knocked down. Those are not things you absolutely need to function like your class (like Rage) so they're okay as limited powers. But they should be made more part of the standard class features instead of optional feats, so that by default every class can feel "well, that last fight really took it out of me, I don't have another one of those in me today" instead of just the casters.
- Maybe look again at the Starfinder (1) system of Stamina/Resolve. That one actually worked really nicely because it puts a generous clock on the number of encounters per day, but it's a pretty similar clock for all classes. And it helps spread out the juice across encounters, instead of adding nova potential for a single encounter. It's much nicer than the PF2 stamina system actually.
This pf3 casting system was nagging at me during my morning routine, so here are some bullet points for a potential pf3 that's a bit more polished.
* Starting FP pool is 10 points, increasing to 20 at max char Lvl
10 is a good number that can allow for both big cost abilities, while being small enough for every FP to matter. 10 can leave 1 point remaining after 3 big turns of 3 FP burn. A (now passive instead of active) recharge rate of 1 FP p 10 min leaves a real cost to going dry without the max possible recharge ending an adventuring day early. Additionally, a dedicated d20 can be used to track FP even at max char level for tabletop.
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* Daily prep is spell selection. No picking ranks of each spell (outside of a weird class feature). Spell slots are spell selection, and cannot be expended / lost in default caster play. If cantrips are still separate from spells, the two occupy different types of slots. Every spell selected can be cast infinitely w/ 0 FP.
This keeps the flavor and theming of how PCs source their spells intact, still maintains important decisions during daily prep, and even fully preserves repertoire casters as those that mostly skip this step.
Classes like Cleric could gain a bonus slot limited to a smaller deity list, etc.
Right now, it's very rare to get flexible slots, and more common to have a feature grant a specific off-list spell, like Witch lessons, which is not at all flexible and a rather unsatisfying perk.
"Slots only, no Ranks" would enable classes like Wizard to have a feature to grant a spell slot that would typically not match their spell list much more simply. Even if the feature limits it in some way, being able to prepare a "primal slot" is a big enough deal to be the cornerstone starting feature of a Wiz thesis, IMO.
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* Spell Ranks in pf3
I do not expect many, if any spells that can scale will repeat pf2e's H: +2R issue where the spell only improves every 4 character levels. That's way too uneven, imo. When I say spell +-1 R in a possible pf3, I am trying to be more granular than what pf2 current has. Technically, having the DC vary slightly is a theoretical fallback benefit to pf3 Heightening, but it would be a design fail/compromise for a spell to only change in that way. Even if there's a generic base Heighten rule where H: +1 awards additional range, a +1 duration, etc, that's much better. Every H +1 really ought to have an impact.
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* 0 FP spells are cast at roughly pf2's max R -2.
The fully infinite 0 FP spells would generally limite themselves to one key effect, terrain shaping, AoE, damage, debuffing, etc. By using a "Focused:" entry to enable the other parts of the spell when spending FP, you can both have the core identity of a spell be available as a 0 FP cantrip while withholding the full effect to the spend of a rationed resource.
0 FP cantrips/spells would do pf2 standard cantrip damage. Debuff spells would have 1 turn minor effects on save, 2 or 3 turn effects on fail, etc.
These would be cast at pf2's -1 to the save DC (but for psychology is pf3's 0 baseline).
I think keeping damage high while putting a "nerf" to actual power in the -1 save is psychologically a good direction to keep things mechanically balanced and feeling good to play. I also kinda expect Paizo to do a better job of keeping spell DCs in line with skill save DCs. I don't want a repeat of my pf2 STR Witch that is very system-motivated to Trip w/ a whip at +3/4/5 compared to spells (why tf was this not at least partially addressed in the remaster...)
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* spending 1 FP as you cast Heightens to pf2's max R -1.
This is the fully featured spell cast in a "expected sustainable burn" manner. DC matches pf2's. Spells now gain their "Focused:" entries, and they heighten 1 R over the 0 FP version.
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* a 3 FP burn Heightens to equal or just above pf2's max R.
This is where spells are expected to make a big impact. Cast at +1 DC and maximum Heighten available to the caster. Each 3 FP spell is (at baseline default) going to require a full 30min of non-combat to recharge passively. IMO this is a good Goldilocks zone of letting a caster burn a big spell every turn in a prepped boss fight, while keeping a passive pressure to spend FP carefully to avoid downtime recharging.
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* Other uses of FP, metamagic
Having a 10 starting pool really opens the door to potent metamagic effects that can be balanced by a FP cost.
How often is Reach Spell really worth an entire Action? Right now, it's not really an interesting choice. |IF| you have Reach, it's usually an estimate of future action cost, it's math, or a non-choice when Reach is the only way. Not an engaging deliberation.
As a noncommittal example, give Reach a +1 FP cost. How many Reach boosted spells are you willing to spend, now that 3 FP is a maxed spell? How would the option to save 10 min of recharge weigh against spending that precious 3rd Action to move? Tying the cost of metamagic into a non-action resource, especially when the non-magic alternative IS doable with actions, is IMO great system design; it makes the player thinking align more closely in the first-person of their unique character by anchoring the deliberation into the rationing of their magics.
Do you hate how Quicken Spell is both a Class Feat AND a once per day ability? In this system, it could easily be balanced as a 0 Action, but 3ish FP cost. (As a design safety, I'd also give the Metamagic trait its own flourish-like 1 p turn limit by default)
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* Benefits of 10 FP baseline for Class Feats
With more room to spend FP, so many desired mechanics can key off it.
Untamed Druids want enhanced shapeshifting spells? Super easy to give the class/order a Feature to spend more FP for an additional effect. With a real resource spend to invoke, a huuuge amount of pressure is removed from the Class Feats.
In pf2 Class Feats are troubled by being niche & often boring mechanical upgrades, taxes to dedicate oneself to a flavorful combat method. As passive expenses upon character progression, even small improvements to repeated actions are mechanically potent in combat, resulting in Class Feats that cannot afford to award anything more than tiny passives or new niche actions.
If something like a Druid Feat to improve shapeshifting spells involves the spend of +1 FP in combat, that new (non-action) cost massively enables the Feats to become more fun / diverse in what they can offer.
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* FP recovery
I do expect spellcasters to have features that conditionally hasten FP recovery, but for those features to be mostly denied to PCs taking Dedications.
An example (base feature, not a Class Feat spend) might be:
[Wizard] Recyclic Replenishment:
After consideration, you have decided to hasten the recovery of your magical energies by recycling your prepared potential. Select a spell slot. At the end of a 10 minute activity, you remake the slot into an unstable siphon, and loose access to the spell. Including the 10 minute activity, this temporary magic enables you to regain FP at twice the base rate. When you next spend FP, you break the siphon and loose this effect.
I think all prepared casters are familiar with the scenario in which they prepared a spell they later learn is going to be useless to them for the rest of the day, so a way to get some use out of it is an easy pitch. A Wizard is IMO the perfect fit for the concept of being so technically adept, they can repurpose one aspect of their magic, a spell slot, to instead recharge more FP.
My idea of a pf3 Wizard is the king spell generalist that has a basic version of most every type of magic feature, boosted FP recovery included.
While I would spitball only a handful of spellcasting classes would directly boost FP recovery, all primarily caster classes would play with FP in some way, such as a small 2nd point pool that's more limited (Cleric god stuff, Sorc bloodline stuff), others may get conditional discounts on FP spent (a Magus empowered by Arcane Cascade), FP refunds based on outcome (Bard performance crit success), etcetera.
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* Infinite spells and healing
The best idea I have is for the trait of magical healing to impose a 1 hr cooldown debuff of "heal exhaustion" upon the spellcaster by default. This would be a stacking penalty that negatively Heightens later healing spells. It ought to outright prevent 0 FP healing spells from restoring HP, with healing spells having a "Focused:" entry that enables repeat some repeated healing so long as FP is being spent. A new spell could even specialize in more efficient out of combat recovery, healing over time and w/ a Focused entry that specifically does not invoke heal exhaustion (but if you slot that spell, it'll not be useful as a combat heal. Do you just deal with the 1hr penalty and take Heal? Budget 2 slots for both?).
This setup both encourages would-be heal-dabblers to dedicate a daily slot to make a real difference w/ healing, while also ensuring that those dabblers without class features cannot outperform specialists that interact w/ the heal exhaustion mechanic. Becoming increasingly inefficient via a negative heightening debuff is also IMO a really good way to align play fun with game balance.
The debuff being caster-side instead of being a recipient partial immunity better fosters meaningful choice IMO. It encourages more diversity in spell choice (AoE VS single, over time VS burst) in ways that are mitigated/ignored if the heal-exhaustion debuff is put upon the targets.
Classes like Cleric can also play with this inherent healing restraint in a way not available to other classes. And not just "ignores first 2 stacks" kind of thing either, but unique/quirky concepts like a "Martyr" Doctrine or Domain with a stance/spell that reduces heal exhaustion when the Cleric takes hits, etc.
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The main goal and benefit of this "Spellcasting is expected to burn FP by default" schema is that it adds a lot of room for classes to identify and differentiate themselves with only tiny changes that don't add much complexity.
Removing specific Ranks from player slots does outright reduce the complexity a bit, but it's obvious the baseline complexity of spellcasting would be increased a bit.
Compared to pf2's habit of having multiple little silos that need to each be tracked separately, IMO, it's easier for players to handle base complexity like FP when it's all integrated into the same core.
And while this potential pf3 is a dash more complex at L1, I do think this system's complexity is about the same for a fully loaded pf2 spellcaster that currently needs to track FP, which slots are spent/ready, and other 1 p day things like Quicken Casting.
All I can do is say that I think the benefits of a bit more baseline complexity would be well worth the cost in pf3.
Whoops, that was a full hour to get out of my system.
Is there a potential to making all "out of combat" magic just skill checks and not cost resources? Like your ability to use magic to undo a lock probably depends on your understanding of how locks work, and your ability to use magic to fly overland depends at least partially on your understanding of how flight works.
Like we spiff out the ritual system so that every kind of magic that one would spend >10 minutes doing would be doable via ritual, and thus accessible to anybody who has the required acumen without costing anybody any daily resources.
You could solve the rarity issue by making the sort of spells that circumvent entire plots (teleportation, detecting lies, etc.) simply very difficult skill checks without external things that make them tractable (e.g. plane shifting is nearly impossible unless you have a tuning fork attuned to the destination plane, which makes it easy.)
If we did this it would be appropriate to actually leverage "Wizards know lots of things because they went to school for this stuff" and not stick them with the fewest default skills, for example.
My actual hope is that they keep vancian casting for the next edition of the game, but iterate on focus spells to make them more plentiful. I want them to more firmly fill the role of 4e style encounter powers (but work the way they do in the remaster), and I want every class to be able to get them.
What if spell slots were the unique mechanic of wizards?
The arcane spell list was theirs alone.
I like spontaneous casting, so no, at a minimum you'd also need the sorcerer-- one prepared and one spontaneous, both pick-a-list so that you could have primal wizards or whatever.
But also, to be clear, doing that would make the problem worse, every caster would take up way more page space, and it'd nerf every other caster in the game to have the per-moment output of the kineticist, in exchange for sustain which doesn't matter because most groups gravitate towards 20-minute adventuring days (which I deliberately phrase as being four increments of the 5-minute adventuring day to reflect the norm of 3–4 encounters.)
Imo, the Kinetcist works, but I don't think a pair of them replace cleric/wizard in the Platonic party very well, there's a weird nuance to it, where the whole party has to be devoting resources to compensate, and it ends up being less efficient, especially for healing, they're nice for taking pressure off a caster's resources while still contributing other things I guess, so that the caster can optimize their firepower for healing or damage.
I'm almost tempted to call them the platonic fifth man, or say that they fill in for the rogue, or function with a foot in multirole where it'll replace wizard/cleric, but only if the rest of the party can step up for burst output-- let's say having Lay on Hands or good Battle Medicine for when their healing output is too low, or following up on their AOE because its less effective than a fireball, because they're paying the cost of having infinite puzzle pieces that are also very flexible.
Like, they gain on the Wizard when the Wizard didn't prepare enough fireballs because they can't run out of fireballs and will always have their fireball prepared, but their fireball is weaker so they really badly want to be supplementing someone else's AOE for the party to have a similar AOE impact-- though specialized builds probably make this less of a problem (e.g. fire junction benefits raising AOE fire damage or whatever) but that means self-cuts to utility (because monofire doesn't have healing, for instance.)
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[...]
Like we spiff out the ritual system so that every kind of magic that one would spend >10 minutes doing would be doable via ritual, and thus accessible to anybody who has the required acumen without costing anybody any daily resources.
[...]
Pf3 should absolutely expand upon the ritual system. That has been a big source of disappointment for me in pf2. About 2 years into pf2 play, I've only just been able to integrate a few ritual spells for character flavor w/ permissive GMs. In general, pf2 rituals are either gp sinks to get character flavor, stupid exploitable in a non-combat way (and banned by the GM), or they are plot devices for APs (which is fine).
Even the baseline expectation for pf2 rituals to require secondary casters just enormously sinks their practical value, it's really sad the concept is mostly squandered.
I don't think a blank check to make every spell doable at no daily cost as a 10 min activity would work.
There's just too many "silver bullet" problem solver spells for that kind of access to work, and an out of combat skill check is not really fun nor a real roadblock. Caster A fails even when Aid boosted, the party knows the spell will solve the problem. They either wait out a cooldown, or circumvent it (Caster B makes an attempt). I cannot imagine many parties would actually roll with the skill-cast fail and try a backup plan, such as risk climbing a wall because the spell fizzled.
That kind of full-book ritual casting could work in a limited capacity as a serious class feature, especially personal list casters like Witch or Wizard.
Even an oddball cost, like locking out (but not expending) a few spell slots for an hour after ritual casting, would be more meaningful / appealing IMO than a skill check "works/fails" type thing.
I really hope we see something similar to Fabula Ultima's take on rituals in PF3e. For those that don't know, FU's rituals essentially allow you to do anything that spell doesn't cover and that your character could realistically do to which the GM sets a MP price for the action. In a sense it works like a prestidigitation spell on steroids and I think with a couple more restrictions and a little less GM fiat it could fit perfectly within the scope of PF. It could also fit perfectly for more magic-based settings like Eberron in which everyone knows at least some magic, even if they don't know to cast spells exactly, allowing them to do mundane tasks through it like cooking or washing the dishes with rituals.
I really hope we see something similar to Fabula Ultima's take on rituals in PF3e. For those that don't know, FU's rituals essentially allow you to do anything that spell doesn't cover and that your character could realistically do to which the GM sets a MP price for the action. In a sense it works like a prestidigitation spell on steroids and I think with a couple more restrictions and a little less GM fiat it could fit perfectly within the scope of PF. It could also fit perfectly for more magic-based settings like Eberron in which everyone knows at least some magic, even if they don't know to cast spells exactly, allowing them to do mundane tasks through it like cooking or washing the dishes with rituals.
It’d be fun if Rituals and Skills in general could both be expanded on with a section of “this is the kind of effect that’s appropriate for this tier of play”. Rituals could be split by odd spell ranks roughly, and Skills could be split by Proficiency tiers and what they enable to do.
And the page space for this could be offered by massively shrinking (or eliminating) the Skill Feats section in the book, and letting all this stuff be more like “this is GM fiat but here’s 75 examples to make it really consistently ruled”.
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I would like to apologize to everyone for having started this thread. I would like to especially apologize to those people who made a good-faith effort to engage with the very narrow intended topic of this thread. I am still interested in the original idea, but I simply do not have what it takes at this point to wade through the thing that this thread has become, and I can now see that attempts to *just* discuss that one topic in this space are pretty much doomed.
To @Unicore in particular, I wish to acknowledge that you were entirely correct, though I did not see it at the time.
I may at some point attempt a version of this thread on the homebrew forum with more care given to the title and the wording. Now is not that time.
Is there a potential to making all "out of combat" magic just skill checks and not cost resources? Like your ability to use magic to undo a lock probably depends on your understanding of how locks work, and your ability to use magic to fly overland depends at least partially on your understanding of how flight works.
Like we spiff out the ritual system so that every kind of magic that one would spend >10 minutes doing would be doable via ritual, and thus accessible to anybody who has the required acumen without costing anybody any daily resources.
You could solve the rarity issue by making the sort of spells that circumvent entire plots (teleportation, detecting lies, etc.) simply very difficult skill checks without external things that make them tractable (e.g. plane shifting is nearly impossible unless you have a tuning fork attuned to the destination plane, which makes it easy.)
If we did this it would be appropriate to actually leverage "Wizards know lots of things because they went to school for this stuff" and not stick them with the fewest default skills, for example.
You are describing magic in Fabula Ultima (at least, maybe there're other games like that). That's a neat game, though lighter on rules.
Well, not exactly, even there only small effects don't take resources (and may even not take a skillcheck). Significant magical effects still take daily resources in the form of mana. Moreover, very powerful rituals are very hard and cost so much mana you can't do them at low levels and probably at all because the cost is over your mana maximum. Here you need some GM-provided (or invented by you) in-narrative ingredients to lower the costs.
Yeah, also rituals are still done by spellcasters through special skills (though given easy and compulsory multiclassing it's rather easy to get).
It could also fit perfectly for more magic-based settings like Eberron in which everyone knows at least some magic, even if they don't know to...
Oh, I know rituals aren't free in FA, but they neither are in PF2e for that matter (though in the case of PF2e they usually cost gp and having someone in the party with the right skills, while FU they are effectively unnamed spells that have their MP cost). I honestly find Fabula Ultima's approach to a lot of things to be somewhat bold in this day and age, in which a lot of systems take stuff from other systems without actually knowing why they work in that system (or even stuff that doesn't work in that system and works even worse in yours for whatever reason). A very clear example of this is the new DC 20, which for whatever reason decided to keep the 5e skill list even when skills literally do nothing in 5e and due to how DC 20 is structured they aren't even needed since the new actions they introduced could easily replace them since they still do nothing in DC 20 either. I specially like how FU handles checks to because it removes the need of skills which in rules light or near-rules light systems like 5e they don't really serve a purpose. I agree that approach wouldn't work in PF because these systems are usually a little more crunchier, but I totally agree with AAAetios that skill feats could be easily removed from the game and taking a note from FU's rituals could work for that as well.
With that said, I don't see PF3e being more cruncy but rather more simply than PF2e currently is, even though not to the extent of the system becoming rules light or nothing like that. TTRGPs has always evolved to become simpler since pretty much forever, but it wasn't until 5e became a thing that a lot of people that usually wouldn't have been interested in TTRPGs took a liking for them because that system was (at east in theory) easy to learn even for begginers. The most common critique for PF2e is that its crunchy even, and while I don't think it means Paizo would want to make a rules light system to attract those people, I do think they would want to make something easier to digest to become more "mainstream". I could easily see PF3e being something similar to PF2e with Proficiency Without Level (but with the system actually balanced with it in mind), Simplified Skill Feats, and Simplified Ancestries variant rules. Just class feats at every even level and general feats at every odd level similar to how it used to be in 3.5 / PF1e. There would likely be less conditions too or conditions would get merged into other conditions (something like stupefied but for all physical scores instead of having clumsy, drained, and enfeebled). I also said in some posts that I would be totally on board with removing armor and weapon categories and just have characters being proficient in "armor" and "weapons" rather than light or medium armor and simple or martial weapons, having the equivalents of each being balanced against each other (which kinda happens already in the case of armor in PF2e).
Like if there's a hypothetical "teleport" ritual that keys off of Arcana, I have no problem with a fighter casting that because a fighter has fewer compelling reasons to invest in Arcana than a Wizard would, and probably wouldn't be as good at it anyway.
Like the effectiveness of the "medicine" skill compared to actually casting spells does suggest that there's at least a little magic involved in "mundane" skills. Like if you got impaled by the ogre, I don't think a purely mundane approach of "clean the wound, bandage it, and get some rest" is going to pay dividends within an hour.
I see no problem with making "magic" available to everybody, and having casters being the people who specialize in it.
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I would like to apologize to everyone for having started this thread. I would like to especially apologize to those people who made a good-faith effort to engage with the very narrow intended topic of this thread. I am still interested in the original idea, but I simply do not have what it takes at this point to wade through the thing that this thread has become, and I can now see that attempts to *just* discuss that one topic in this space are pretty much doomed.
To @Unicore in particular, I wish to acknowledge that you were entirely correct, though I did not see it at the time.
I may at some point attempt a version of this thread on the homebrew forum with more care given to the title and the wording. Now is not that time.
I did my best to steer clear and not poison the well. People get very defensive and stubborn in conversations that sound like they could be settling the future of the game rather than brainstorming ideas for how a thing could possibly work. then it gets really hard to focus on the originally proposed idea because people have their own ideas that they feel like they need to assert here because this is for the future of the game.
I had a thought for a potential future wizard. As they level have a list of utility spells that normally would have a short duration but now that the wizard has access to spells 2 ranks higher they can take one from the list and cast it at will and choose any duration.
Kind of like making wizardy things that at lower levels are hard to do become as natural to them as breathing.
the spells dont have to be ones with direct combat application. The stronger the wizard the more mundane the next rank of magic becomes to them.
In addition here could be a combat spell version of this feature that allows choosing a combat spell 3 or 4 ranks lower and makes it at will cast at that rank.
I kind of feel like the wizard could be cool if it get to a point where animating objects for chores, opening doors or turning pages with a thought, floating instead of walking, and other wizardy things just become second nature to them.
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I had a thought for a potential future wizard. As they level have a list of utility spells that normally would have a short duration but now that the wizard has access to spells 2 ranks higher they can take one from the list and cast it at will and choose any duration.
Kind of like making wizardy things that at lower levels are hard to do become as natural to them as breathing.
the spells dont have to be ones with direct combat application. The stronger the wizard the more mundane the next rank of magic becomes to them.In addition here could be a combat spell version of this feature that allows choosing a combat spell 3 or 4 ranks lower and makes it at will cast at that rank.
I kind of feel like the wizard could be cool if it get to a point where animating objects for chores, opening doors or turning pages with a thought, floating instead of walking, and other wizardy things just become second nature to them.
Yeah, if the idea of memorizing a spell for the day has a baseline of casting it at will like a cantrip, and the limited spell resources is a type of points you spend to heighten spells for combat, it opens a lot of interesting design opportunities, like that infinite duration thing.
Pf2 actually does a pretty good job of that concept via 24 hr duration and contingency spells. However, there's balance issues due to things like wands, scrolls, and the generally very high number of total spell slots as the levels get high. As soon as you get more slots than you'll use per day, it's just wasteful to *not* use long-duration buffs & a contingency spell.
If pf3 goes for the "don't loose slots when cast" idea, that opens up dedicating slots for things that are less of active spells, and more akin to perpetual buffs or sustained effects.
And with the design foundation of "expected point burn per turn" it adds an entire dimension to balance long-effect spells.
One example would be a sustained cost to match the effect, like reducing your max FP by 1 while you keep Magic Armor sustained for the day. It would be a great way to keep such spells both useful and balanced, while also contributing to the power fantasy of a Wizard growing in their magical prowess as the slow gain of max FP across char levels makes it easier and easier to budget for such spells.
In pf3, any baseline use of a Focus Point / Magic Point system for all spellcasting removes the largest issues w/ how consumable spells are identical in function to slot-cast ones in pf2. Even if the daily slot is circumvented by the item, there's still the point cost to think about.
There's just so many options for how FP based casting system in pf3 could handle wands, scrolls, and staves.
* item-spell type A can be cast at will as a slotted spell, but only ever as the 0 FP cantrip version. Still grows in power w/ the caster, just at their baseline.
* item-spell type B can use FP to heighten, but always costs +1 FP when done
* item-spell type C can be injected with the casters FP ahead of time, locking that portion of FP to be only usable w/ said item (staves)
Sorry to be blunt, but any design where the GM has to turn on/off mechanics "because that last goblin is no longer a threat" is completely dead on arrival.
Bluntness is fine, here's some of my own: a half-decent GM should be able to come up with a narrative statement to make it obvious to the players that the situation is diffused and over. It's as simple as saying "The final goblin, surrounded by his dead companions, with blood running down his side, throws his spear to the ground and drops to his knees to cry salty tears onto the fighter's boots. What do you do now?" If you can't come up with such narrative statements, don't run foes that can't be individually threatening. Half-clever players and a bad GM can combine to abuse any system with player agency.
Again, all spells would become infinite cantrips castable w/ 0 FP.
Nobody plays a wizard because of the cantrips, that would just be a kineticist. When I said spells I meant powerful effects.
magic write up
Speaking of abusing systems, the easy and obvious abuse case here is that the party doesn't act like you assume they will, pushed by the incentive structure your system establishes. They will throw all the resources they can at each encounter, then wait for those resources to refill before moving forward. That, or they wait after every other encounter because the pool is deep enough. Without time pressure the players just say "our characters wait an hour and a half" after every fight, which costs them 5 seconds and no effort to ensure maximum encounter power. The system becomes an in-encounter attrition system instead of a between-encounter attrition system.
Not to say a GM can't make the system work, they just need to get the time pressure right. For a time pressure to be effective it has to be faster than the time scale for resource renewal. At a 10 minute recharge rate we need to be looking at encounters every hour, at least, before attrition is relevant. Those encounters also need to be hard on average or else the caster isn't blowing more than 6 points per hour, if they have any trigger discipline. I suppose the best way to work this system as the GM is for the players to be told "the evil wizard will complete his ritual as soon as the last light of the sun fades, which your characters know to be in 3 hours", then have four potential encounters before the wizard is defeated. If you run a campaign where similar time restrictions can be regularly used, then I think this system will work well.
I think, jumping in here, it may be good to reinforce the challenging of the assumption that martials should not have a daily resource pool... Beyond that, operating with the assumption of keeping spell slots, I would like to introduce my own idea...
This idea is the ideal that my homerules for Stamina continue to slide towards, though I don't expect martials to make use of additional stamina-powered abilities more than once per encounter. I fear making it more frequent than that would make them feel like spellcasters, just casting iron instead of spells.
As for the cantrips, I think it is necessary for balance that a steady stream of cantrips feels less powerful than a steady stream of martial output. Otherwise the casters go back to being just better than the martials at combat, which is basically just better than martials. That said, I think it might be possible to thread the balance-needle there with additional martial abilities.
Speaking of abusing systems, the easy and obvious abuse case here is that the party doesn't act like you assume they will, pushed by the incentive structure your system establishes. They will throw all the resources they can at each encounter, then wait for those resources to refill before moving forward. That, or they wait after every other encounter because the pool is deep enough. Without time pressure the players just say "our characters wait an hour and a half" after every fight, which costs them 5 seconds and no effort to ensure maximum encounter power. The system becomes an in-encounter attrition system instead of a between-encounter attrition system.
It is much, much easier for a GM to motivate players by time than the huge hairball of perverse incentives that arise from players gaining power by taking more turns in combat before ending it.
A party who attempts to take even a 30 min stop to recharge one 3 FP burst in the middle of a hostile manor, cave system, etc, should generally NOT be able to do so. It is absurdly video-gamey, and parties would typically need to retreat to a safe location first.
The system becomes an in-encounter attrition system instead of a between-encounter attrition system.
Needing 100 minutes of non-combat to recharge from 0 is not a per-encounter mechanic and you know it.
Once per minute is set to be the standard per encounter time frame, while once per 10 min is the standard "moment of safety" time frame. Once per hour is the "okay you are definitely not in immediate danger" estimate.Because yes, if the party is able to take the time and fully replenish themselves, then they should be able to do so.
Half the point of the "estimated FP burn every turn" baseline is so that casters never feel the need to be the day-ender and beg the party to sleep to get their slots back.
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Nobody plays a wizard because of the cantrips, that would just be a kineticist. When I said spells I meant powerful effects.
Spellcasting fundamentally features variance in spell power based on the caster's in the moment decision.
Genuinely giving spellcasters a 0 cost baseline was such a "design need" that cantrips as a concept were invented.
As such, pf2 exists in a hybrid transitional state where the antiquated and inflexible method of resource management, daily spell slots, is slapped down next to pure infinite cantrips.
And can we guess what pf2 is half way toward transitioning into?
Making all spells castable all day is a super obvious next step in the design's evolution.
Hence why that's my pitch for pf3 spellcasting.
Deciding how powerful you want to amp up that next spell, and deliberating your resource for THAT specific decision, is a system upgrade. With use-once, ranked slots, that design forces the choice of momentary power to be tangled with the choice of the spell itself. That system jank is why it's so common to see GMs give Sorcs "all spells are signature spells" as that decouples the momentary power choice from spell selection.
The change to the FP burn decouples the momentary spell choice from the power choice; it even preserves the per-day lock of what spells to pick.
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And you absolutely have not convinced me that a system where the GM needs to step in any time they suspect the players are sandbagging is a good idea.
The smallest I can compress what I'm trying to say about the gain spells by landing spells is this:
Rewarding players with more resources for taking more turns is outright antithetical to the concept of an attrition system.
Attrition systems always end up forcing the players to pay a cost. If it's not currency like gold, then it always comes back to costing time.
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What are the actual game design problems with Vancian-styled casting (by which I mean both proper Vancian casters and other slot-based casters like spontaneous casters)? Yes, "feeling bad" is a valid design critique to an extent, but Vancian style does not feel bad to everyone, and is certainly not the cause of the actual problem being discussed (see 5e and Pf1e where casters use the same system and are gods among men).
Disagree with the last part of your assertion quite a bit. PF1 and 5e prepared casters are much stronger, which allow them to brute force past some issues, but discussions over caster longevity and resource management are not unique to PF2 either. They were very much part of the discourse around Pf1/3.5 (albeit generally considered less of an issue because of said power discussion) and to an extent 5e too.
The issue of caster power and caster resource management are connected insofar as that one can server as an enhancing or mitigating factor for the other, but they are still distinct considerations, and it is simply incorrect to suggest that this is some new contrivance of PF2's. The whole "15 minute adventuring day" discourse predates it by decades.
Feat based casting with focus point boost/ amp would be how I would do it.Possibly with different refresh rate for different classes. Maybe giving the casters the option to get a really boosted version of the feat once per day at the cost of access to the feat for the day.
The more I think about the concept of burning a daily spell slot as a possible cost -alongside- a baseline recharging FP design, the more I want to include it.
The "game feel" of a Feat ability that requires you to sacrifice a day-limited resource, impacting but not crippling your magic potency for the rest of the day (by being unable to use that 1 p day ability), the more I think that abilities that are themselves locked to "once per day" are super boring and less engaging by comparison.
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If pf3 uses daily memorized spells + time recharging FP, having that extra layer of resources opens so many neat design possibilities in what Feats/abilities can cost the player in combat.
There's simple/boring but impactful concepts catered to traditionalists, like burning out the spell for rest of the day in exchange for heightening it one above your normal max possible.
More interesting to me is how it opens up oddball sideways costs like a Wizard Feat/Thesis allowing them to prepare an all-day spell with a minor metamagic like Reach injected into its baseline, in exchange for that spell occupying 2 daily memory slots instead of 1.
That's the kind of magical mastery that feels super Wizardly to me, IMO.
Cantrips as a concept could even become spells that lack a "Focused:" entry like all the multi-effect spells we know as normal do, and in exchange cantrips could be baseline able to be augmented at the prep stage.
As soon as the momentary power pumped into spellcasting is left to be regulated by FP, it opens room for even cantrips to get a glow-up.
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The trouble with Power Points that Psions had in 3.X and forward was that it was just literally, in every way, a better and more abusable system than Spell Slots and it existed alongside those same Slots in actual games.
Spell Slots and Cantrips need to just go away, video games solved this problem way back in the 1980s, just create, test, balance, and use a system for Mana.
The trouble with Power Points that Psions had in 3.X and forward was that it was just literally, in every way, a better and more abusable system than Spell Slots and it existed alongside those same Slots in actual games.
Spell Slots and Cantrips need to just go away, video games solved this problem way back in the 1980s, just create, test, balance, and use a system for Mana.
Case in point against.
Eyuden Chronicles vs Suikoden Series games.
Eyuden went with mana and I miss the spell slots of Suikoden.
But there is a lot more to it. That is a video game where there are many trivial battles that having dedicated weaker spells to throw out while not affecting your supply of stronger spells made sense. Mana just meant you dont want to use spells at all in trivial fights because its taking your resources for the harder fights.
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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.
Focusing on this.
After reading the first posts, I mused that we would need a resource that cannot be abused just by looking for easy encounters.
And not something that is IC time-based because it's the 15-minutes adventure all over again.
Maybe something based on encounters' Severity/ budget could work.
And then I thought of Hero Points.
These follow roughly the tempo of the game and are based on the GM's assessment of heroism/difficulty.
And they are of much more use offensively to martials than to casters, which strikes me as unfair.
So, maybe a new use of Hero Points specific to casters, like increasing a spell's DC or recovering a max level slot/spell prepared, could help with the OP's point.
I mean, I don't comparing videogames (JRPGs in this case) to TTRPGs is fair even if they share similarities. I'm one of those people that in JRPGs doesn't spend a single consumable becaue "it could be useful later" and you finish the game with a full stack of potions and elixirs in your back. In the case of the Suikoden games I don't remember a single time that I use spell that wasn't against a boss because I was constantly thinking "I don't want to run out of spells before the boss". Though I have to say that I'm not the biggest caster fan because I'm not a fan of daily resources either.
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The reason Mana is so effective is that it is trivially easy to balance the overall cap and increase it over time as well while also providing affordable consumables and specific abilities that allow you to regenerate it.
To me, the thing that really puts the most nails in the proverbial coffin (even if it's not the last one) is that after you have access to more than two tiers of slots you will end up with your two highest tier slots being effective actually to use for various effects that can be used and then you have one to seven tiers of slots that, while still being limited by x/day, are always going to be weaker than the Cantrips that are unlimited use which creates a situation where players are heavily encouraged to retrain every time they get a new tier of slots for that growing list into things that are one-off spells that do a specific niche thing as enablers rather than as stuff you will ever actually consistently want to use.
PF2 has already come a long way to improve the QoL for tabletop play by shedding legacy rules and mechanics and if we are talking about the next edition here I think that it would be the perfect opportunity to finally rid ourselves of the worst of the baggage held due to tradition by ditching slots completely... I mean, any TTRPG veteran will recall how often intense arguments and debate have been waged regarding the flaws of so-called "vancian" casting and... I say bury that sucker, put it to rest alongside Leadership and the peasant rail-gun.
Now, does that mean Clerics and Druids are going to have to learn to get along without automatically being able to take a day off and then cast ANY spell under the sun? Yes, but my response to that is "Oh no... anyway."
The reason Mana is so effective is that it is trivially easy to balance the overall cap and increase it over time as well while also providing affordable consumables and specific abilities that allow you to regenerate it.
To me, the thing that really puts the most nails in the proverbial coffin (even if it's not the last one) is that after you have access to more than two tiers of slots you will end up with your two highest tier slots being effective actually to use for various effects that can be used and then you have one to seven tiers of slots that, while still being limited by x/day, are always going to be weaker than the Cantrips that are unlimited use which creates a situation where players are heavily encouraged to retrain every time they get a new tier of slots for that growing list into things that are one-off spells that do a specific niche thing as enablers rather than as stuff you will ever actually consistently want to use.
PF2 has already come a long way to improve the QoL for tabletop play by shedding legacy rules and mechanics and if we are talking about the next edition here I think that it would be the perfect opportunity to finally rid ourselves of the worst of the baggage held due to tradition by ditching slots completely... I mean, any TTRPG veteran will recall how often intense arguments and debate have been waged regarding the flaws of so-called "vancian" casting and... I say bury that sucker, put it to rest alongside Leadership and the peasant rail-gun.
Now, does that mean Clerics and Druids are going to have to learn to get along without automatically being able to take a day off and then cast ANY spell under the sun? Yes, but my response to that is "Oh no... anyway."
Could make all slot casting wave casting keeping only top two ranks and then implement the idea I put up for wizards where they can choose a lower rank spell that becomes at will once the wizard is 2 ranks higher for utility spells or 3-4 ranks higher for offensive spells.
I've never really clicked with the idea of mana pool/points system - mostly because I can't get away from thinking that people would either
cast everything at the highest level possible or horde their points if they reset at the end of the day
or every caster would turn into a supercharged 5E Warlock if they reset like focus points do.
The former would I think potentially exacerbate sustainability issues and the later would be fun in the short term but would both flatten variety among casters and make balancing them with martial a pain (or lead to the power level of magic being dialled back overall to compensate which I suspect would feel disappointing to a lot of people).
Having said that I've spent the last hour or so mulling over how I would build a mana points based casting system that allows for caster to engage with it in different ways, gives players better choices when it comes to sustainability and still feels like something that could be balanced to play nicely with martials.
So here's my first draft:
- All spells come at a base rank that like cantrips today can be cast an infinite amount of times
- At the start of each day spell caster get a pool of mana points they can spend on heightening any of their spells as they cast them up to what we would now think of as the top rank of spell available to caster at a given level. (The more points you spend the higher the rank of that particular casting of a spell is)
- Mana points can be recovered much like focus points in a short amount of time outside combat. I would probably balance it so the maximum amount of mana points recoverable this way goes down throughout the day so we can maintain parity between casters and martials without dialling down the power of magic overall. Additionally I think I'd like to see this reward people who conserve mana points by letting them get back all or at least more of their original pool back this way. That way we would hopefully preserve some of the more considerate resource management that some people clearly value when playing casters. Regardless everyone gets all their mana points back at the start of the next day.
- To preserve some of the distinction between spontaneous and prepared casters you could do something like give spontaneous casters a larger mana pool and let prepared casters prepare a certain number of spells pre-heightened that they can then cast without at that rank spending less or no mana points. (Not claiming this preserves how they play today more that it gives them distinctly different ways of casting and engaging with spells which I personally really enjoy about casters in PF2E)
- You could then build on that basic system letting different classes interact with it in different ways. Reduced the size of the mana pool (and maybe available spells) but always get all of them when recharging throughout the day for 5E Warlock like casting, the option to have a specific spell available at a higher base level, reduce cost of heightening for spontaneous casters with certain class feats and give prepared casters the ability to push one of their pre-heightened spells beyond their normal top rank once a day.
I've never really clicked with the idea of mana pool/points system - mostly because I can't get away from thinking that people would either
cast everything at the highest level possible or horde their points if they reset at the end of the day
or every caster would turn into a supercharged 5E Warlock if they reset like focus points do.
[..]
One important step when thinking as a designer is to come to peace with the notion that players will "nova" against bosses. It's totally fine for players to try to ration and prep to dump all their power into such a fight. The system does need to make sure it can handle that burst, but one must NOT gimp the whole system to attempt to make going nova difficult for players to do via design.
To deal with the point hoarding + dumping issue you need to put incentives there to tempt players into letting go / overcoming that psychological trap. Consider them gunshy from previous bad times; you don't want to be restrictive in design, but permissive, players will experiment when they feel comfortable/safe to do so.
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My first tool for this is by making the baseline default spell power blast take 1 FP per spell, while the infinite version of spellcasting is 0 cost and communicated to be sub-par (such as by the Focused: entries on spells), that normalizes the notion of spending FP every round. That "base per spell cost" also allows the budgeting of the "max blast" oomph of spells to cost an inefficient amount more, such as Heightening in pf3 R's +0 | +1 | +2 costing 0 | 1 | 3 Focus/Magic Points.
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A 2nd important design support to help get players on board with spending little bits of FP instead of hoarding is that the diversity of tools that key into FP, such as metamagic primarily costing FP instead of actions.
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The 3rd pillar to support that FP design I have not emphasized enough, but it's the class-specific points that work alongside FP, and which would fade after combat.
If a Bard gets a crit Performance Success when casting some Power Ballad, by having that crit award 1 "BP" that can be spent to reduce the FP cost of the Max Blast spell next turn, players will respond to such "use it or loose it" design.
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A 4th pillar of support is to make FP recharge still take significant time, but make it passive in contrast to pf2's active.
That takes advantage of players not knowing how long it will be until the next fight breaks out, and the psychology that drags with it.
Any time a caster is sitting at max FP while the party spends an hr spelunking to the next fight, that means that the caster wasted his chance to burn FP in the fight before. If every 10 min detour or mini investigation of a room passively recharges 1 FP, that alone does a huge bulk of the heavy lifting to encourage players to try to sit somewhere around 50 to 75% full of FP, instead of 100% FP.
Restated: Passive FP recharging means that how much FP you'll gain between fights for free becomes unpredictable, and players will be naturally incentivized to estimate and match that "free spend" even for low-danger fights.
I think the most balanced way to implement a mana / magic points system in PF2e or an hyphothetic PF3e would be if the highest limited slots would still be limited to a certain number of casts per day. For example, let's take a 9th level wizard. If we do a 1:1 conversion of their spell slots into spell points it would be something like 40 points I think. The two highest rank of spells would be 4th and 5th, which would have a cost of 4 and 5 points to cast a spell respectively. If the wizard wanted to cast 4th and 5th rank spells they would only be able to do so 2 times per day (kinda like a bounded caster having only 2 spell slots of their two highest rank spells) but their lower rank spells would be more freely available to them.
This would effectively mean that out of those 40 points there would be 18 of those that are "taken" by their highest rank spells, with the other 22 for the ocassional lower level spell (and I guess they would also have a separate magic pool for their school spells which would be equal to 15 points, with the the limitation of their highest two rank spells being one instead of two per day, which means 9 of those 15 points would be dedicated to those higher rank spells).
I think the most balanced way to implement a mana / magic points system in PF2e or an hyphothetic PF3e would be if the highest limited slots would still be limited to a certain number of casts per day.
That was my first thought too and I think you are completely right in principle. My only concern doing it that way round would be that I think two levels of restriction - ie you can only cast a spell twice but you also have to spend mana points to cast it - can feel really unfun and quite unfair even if it objectively isn't.
Purely anecdotal of course but I have watched a very good friend play a warlock in a 5e game for a over a year now. There are class features you can choose that give you an extra spell you can then cast once per day using one of your spell slots. He is consistently one of the most powerful characters in the game and still can't get away from the fact that it feels like he is paying for that spell twice (and honestly I don't blame him).
I think the most balanced way to implement a mana / magic points system in PF2e or an hyphothetic PF3e would be if the highest limited slots would still be limited to a certain number of casts per day.
That was my first thought too and I think you are completely right in principle. My only concern doing it that way round would be that I think two levels of restriction - ie you can only cast a spell twice but you also have to spend mana points to cast it - can feel really unfun and quite unfair even if it objectively isn't.
Purely anecdotal of course but I have watched a very good friend play a warlock in a 5e game for a over a year now. There are class features you can choose that give you an extra spell you can then cast once per day using one of your spell slots. He is consistently one of the most powerful characters in the game and still can't get away from the fact that it feels like he is paying for that spell twice (and honestly I don't blame him).
I agree it feels arbritary, but the first time I looked at bounded casters I also felt it was arbritary that they lost their lower level spell slots, though with time I got used to it and I see it as normal. I think this change would be similar in that it would feel really weird at the beggining but eventually people would take it for granted and don't even think with it if the system ends up being a better solution. It's also not taht crazy to think about a mage that can only cast certain spells a certain number of spells per day even if they otherwise don't have the same restrictions with their other spells. This isn't the best comparison, but in early Naruto I remember the characters had to avoid using their strongest jutsus in the beggining of combat because if those failed or weren't enough to take down their enemies they knew they wouldn't be able to use them again because using them required a ton of chakra. If I had to use another example for anime I would also think of Yusuke from YuYuHakusho that in the beggining could also use his spirit gun a few times per day (in the beggining he could only use it once) even if he could use spiritual energy to augment his power all day.
A more accurate example would be Sanderson's Mistborn series, though I only read like the first half of the first book so I could be either misremebering or not be that accurate to how stuff actually works later on. They had to ingest the metals to actually use the powers associated with that metal, but there were some "lesser" effects that were almost always available since they didn't burn as much metal as the truly strong ones. There's likely tons of examples of other games or books in which characters can seemingly use "magic" semi-infinitely but can't use their strongest moves more than a couple of times before running out of power.
One important step when thinking as a designer is to come to peace with the notion that players will "nova" against bosses. It's totally fine for players to try to ration and prep to dump all their power into such a fight. The system does need to make sure it can handle that burst, but one must NOT gimp the whole system to attempt to make going nova difficult for players to do via design.
Of course a player going "nova" in a boss fight (or occasionally in a non-boss fight because why not) is not an issue, but if a system let's you cast your top level spells every encounter all day long that's not going nova, that's your base power level and the game will need to be balanced around that assumption.
My first tool for this is by making the baseline default spell power blast take 1 FP per spell, while the infinite version of spellcasting is 0 cost and communicated to be sub-par
I do think that is an interesting way to get players more comfortable spending FP. Although I can still see players get stuck in a scarcity mind set and then just having an extra miserable time when they are not sure about commiting FP, so would still be crucial to have the right size overall power pool and a solid recharage mechanic.
A 2nd important design support to help get players on board with spending little bits of FP instead of hoarding is that the diversity of tools that key into FP, such as metamagic primarily costing FP instead of actions.
I'm in two minds about this - really like it as a mechanism to onboard players into spending FP for incremental benefits but it would probably make the system overall more unwieldy to play and balance. Then again also opens the door to have some really interesting and powerful metamagic options (given they compete with heightening spells in the power budget).
Any time a caster is sitting at max FP while the party spends an hr spelunking to the next fight, that means that the caster wasted his chance to burn FP in the fight before. If every 10 min detour or mini investigation of a room passively recharges 1 FP, that alone does a huge bulk of the heavy lifting to encourage players to try to sit somewhere around 50 to 75% full of FP, instead of 100% FP.Restated: Passive FP recharging means that how much FP you'll gain between fights for free becomes unpredictable, and players will be naturally incentivized to estimate and match that "free spend" even for low-danger fights.
Wouldn't caster players just want to chill till they are back to 100% (or maybe 90%) if they get back 1FP/10minutes? If that is the only way they get FP back and it is tied to say Exploration Activities to avoid the "let's just wait untill we are back at full charge" situation, I think it's more likely to make hesitant players paly more conservatively not less as they have no way of predicting how many FP they can reliably recharge before needing them again. I can see the background recharge encouraging spending FP on utility type spells during exploration though which is a really nice touch. Paired with a more reliable secondary recharge that could be a really good way to balance combat and utility spell cost. Though I can practically already hear various of my regular players shout - but surely that will have taken at leat 10 minutes so I should get an extra FP.
I agree it feels arbritary, but the first time I looked at bounded casters I also felt it was arbritary that they lost their lower level spell slots, though with time I got used to it and I see it as normal.
That is an excellent point to be fair - we defenitely do get very used to the conceits of the games we play and the media we consume.
As of now I still can't quite envisage that sort of double taxation not feeling bad. Maybe at that point it would be cleaner to say you can cast these spells twice per day and for everyhting else you got a mana pool to do with as you please.
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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.
I've only played PF2e in organized play. Six or eight encounters seem like double the number of combat encounters I'm used to seeing in a day. Which make me wonder if it's an adventure design issue more than a class issue. or that the game is better balanced for organized play.
I also wonder how party size affects this. I find that parties of 6 tend to manage resources a bit better, and also are not affected as much by a single party member having a bad die roll.
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.
That was the choice the designers made when they decided to have lots of cheap and easy healing repeatable every ten minutes. We don't even have D&D5s hit dice which eventually exhaust.
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.
PF2 is a lot better because the options you are after are already in the game. People talk about at will, encounter and daily powers. Which the casters have already with cantrips, focus spells and spell slots. You can build acaster with good focus spells if you always want to have something in an encounter.Then we have the Kineticist if you don't like daily powers. We also have the Wellspring Magic, if you want to always have spells available.
Notably, a lot of games that used to use mana have gone away from it-- MMO characters frequently still have them, but the actual play is more about managing cooldowns or build-and-spend resources (usually both), which is a more rigid version of spell slots, but they refresh more frequently too. Persona SP is mana, but its characters also burn health for physical attacks.
Notably, a lot of games that used to use mana have gone away from it-- MMO characters frequently still have them, but the actual play is more about managing cooldowns or build-and-spend resources (usually both), which is a more rigid version of spell slots, but they refresh more frequently too. Persona SP is mana, but its characters also burn health for physical attacks.
Though ironically a lot of MMOs have done that for the same reason as this thread, addressing the friction between game balance and selective attrition.
And what video games have per- day limits? If you get to a checkpoint, you replenish your resources to full.
Even if you start talking MMOs, you can see how they have evolved over time.
WoW had their Hearthstone, the "go home" cooldown item, start at a 1 hour cool down. Even though that item has a very specific function to end one's adventuring, that cooldown has shrunk and shrunk over time. I think it is as low as a 6min cooldown now?
My point is that basically no game system does the "once per day" powers that old-style ttrpgs do, and for good reason.
No matter how you slice it, every significant encounter has to account for the party spellcaster(s) entering that fight fully rested and at 100% Because that is a possibility, it has to be accounted for.
But, the party also could be low on daily resources, and the higher that power gap could be, the harder it is to deal w/ for the designers.
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In my opinion, keeping which spells are selected for the day is fine, and would work to maintain the legacy design of old slot casters. But I really think it's apparent that game design, including ttrpg design, has learned that power points / etc really ought to be fully recoverable throughout the day.
Even the notion of potentially loosing / cashing out daily spell-memory slots is *not* a hit to power if spells are heightened w/ FP. Loosing a spell or two becomes a diversity loss, which can be a hit to vertical power, but is much safer to interact w/ from a design perspective. If that core of "expected FP burn per spell turn" is in there though, that core spell power is extremely safe for designers to count on to always be there.
How much a caster is designed around attrition becomes how big their FP pool is, and consequently how long it would take to fully recover.
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My party literally just limped through the last encounter of a 3 session long set of fights in a mayoral manor in SoT, and it was honestly not fun in large part due to this very attrition issue. We had no way to know ahead of time how many fights the AP wrote in there, and as soon as we got on the battle map and started fight 1, we had the instincts to conserve. It did not matter. I had a single bomb left, used every magic item daily, every slot, every spell scroll, every healing elixir. Wood Kin carries again, with a shout out to the Oracle/Druid who knew to get Crushing Ground, though we only had 2 10-min pauses for FP recharge.
The AP has a whole lot of issues (oh so many), but dealing with such wildly varying attrition demands is not a thing that needs to be there.
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Notably, a lot of games that used to use mana have gone away from it-- MMO characters frequently still have them, but the actual play is more about managing cooldowns or build-and-spend resources (usually both), which is a more rigid version of spell slots, but they refresh more frequently too. Persona SP is mana, but its characters also burn health for physical attacks.Though ironically a lot of MMOs have done that for the same reason as this thread, addressing the friction between game balance and selective attrition.
There's also the issue that in a tabletop game you're relying on human memory to track things like "cooldowns" which has significantly more overhead than "using computer memory."
Like the Exalted tick system with the battle wheel would have worked great in a video game, but it was a hurdle to get people over to get them to actually play the game.