There are some video games that toy with the space, Persona works like this on the most basic level-- you're given a date by which you have to complete dungeons by, and every time you go into the dungeon it consumes the rest of the day when you leave, but only leaving provides a full reset to all your resources, so you're balancing the number of adventuring days you take to finish with the days until the bad things happen, or in reality (since a skilled player would never let it get that bad) with all the other activities you could spend the day performing.
That is how the series (after 2 anyway) is built to function, the catch is that the way it's developed over time is that the meta is to do everything the game allows you to do in one day, and there are mechanics you can game to support that-- like rings that gradually regenerate your SP so that you can spam heal your party and just not have to leave, and there's nothing that consumables can't cure, so that and some grinding can trivialize doing the entire thing in one adventuring day.
There are others with similarish mechanics, including some dungeon crawling roguelikes that function off trying to get to the end of the run before your resources run out, and then bringing new toys on the next run. Survival crafters, perhaps surprisingly, have a form of it, where you outings can be very profitable, but you have to stock up on stuff (like food) before you go, especially if they're on the more brutal side.
Pokémon actually works like this, surprisingly, every Pokémon move has a certain number of uses like spell slots, and you spend them trying to get to the end of the route or dungeon you're in without having to go back, as well as maintaining your hp with only potions to help, and the only way to get everything back is to get to town.
The biggest challenge of each game's main story is a gauntlet challenge of five extremely powerful trainers, and you have to husband your resources to beat them all by making sure you have Pokémon that can deal with each of them, uses of your attacks leftover, and keeping everything healthy through the end.
Notably, the strongest moves have the least uses, so while some moves can be used twenty or forty times, fire blast and hydro pump can be used five times (with an item that can increase the number of times.) The only real disruption this model has seen is that they keep making the games even easier, but there's popular rules variations that make them harder.
My main issue with Mana point systems in TTRPGs is that they tend to incentivize that hoarding-nova nature. Which isn't really a balance concern, but it does nothing to prevent the 15 minute adventuring day, and, in fact, tends to make it worse.
Mana systems can be built with that in mind. You have some zero cost options and some discounted cost options. It is easy to imagine abilities like once per minute pay 2 mana less on the cost of a fireball.
Saving something for a big nova is already in the game.A spell blending wizard essentially burns most of his low and middle rank spells for more at the top. That is not a lot different to the effect of a mana point system.
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From a sustainability perspective I don't see a huge difference in "slots" vs. "mana points", I just think that casters shouldn't start the day at 100% and monotonically count down until they're out of stuff. Addressing the sustainability question is more about "is there a way to replenish your spent resources somehow."
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Staves in p2e do already use a mana system. Charges.
Slots for a level 20 wizard.
1 4
2 4
3 4
4 4
5 4
6 4
7 4
8 4
9 4
10 1
A level 20 pathfinder 2e wizards has these slot.
But if its all converted to mana kind of like charges at a 1 point transfer equal to spell rank the player has a total of 220 charges.
i mean is there any point to a system that allows 24 level 9 spells to be cast per day? who needs to cast anything of lower rank ever.
at level 5 the same wizard would have 21 charges and could cast up to 7 level 3 spells a day. Why do anything at a lower rank even at level 5?
i know this set of costs and resources is just one way to set it up and ofcourse a difference balance point would need to be used if spell casting was to be anything in terms of balance as it is now but it does illustrate a key difference in mana vs spell slots.
Designers get less control over the balancing of spells. They cant use ranks anymore to the same effect. it gets reduced to cost and what you can do for the cost, along with access at what levels.
[...]
However as it currently works now, a long rest is no different from a video game where you need to find a bed or bonfire or checkpoint to heal and regain mana. The trick with those systems is that those rest spots are either somewhat rare, or have some sort of cost, like in a dungeon or just whenever there is some sort of time constraints. Plus, unlike a video game where it would be mildly annoying to manually rest after every battle when there is no cost to resting, in TTRPGs all you need to do is just say you're resting, or even just let time pass to the next day.
In my opinion, players declaring, and receiving, a rest after a fight in pf2e is done far too leniently and without consequence, in large part due to expectations set by video games,
but mostly I think it comes from veterans of D&D style per-day powers being numb to how big of a narrative ask such pauses really are. I think that quick dismissal of "I know we are 70% through storming the castle, but lets take a 10 min break, yeah?"
is *already* a huge pain-point in pf2, just one that veterans will/have grown numb to.
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If players are partway through raiding a floor of a ____, sure, there can be some allowance for the lack of reactivity if they move quickly from one fight to another.
If the players decide to stop for a full 10 min without even knowing if there are foes behind the next door, it is 100% up to the GM to let the players know they may be interrupted. Just as importantly, the GM needs to occasionally make good on that threat and have the foes open the door and initiate combat while half the party still has a medkit in their hands.
And leaving to come back the next day? Most of the time there would be serious consequences foe-side, but veteran D&D/pf players have been conditioned for years to hand wave such consequences (all the more so with written APs).
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I think that if pf3 is designed with a much bigger emphasis on FP due to it being baked into spellcasting power, all the mechanical benefits aside, there will be narrative benefits as "normal" play will adapt to discourage/interrupt pf2's current 10-min "water breaks" & "finish it tomorrow" norm. Because it is not the players fault for hand-waiving narrative problems arising from the system design, it's the design that ought be improved.
Right now in pf2, even the small 10 min pauses can often break the suspension of disbelief, but as of now they do not seriously threaten game balance. More than not threaten it, I would say that the balance of pf2, at minimum, seriously encourages the 10 min pauses.
Honestly, I will go further and say that such pauses are almost mandatory for many of the APs to function. Every now and then, the APs will surprise players with huge maps full of encounters. Players are stuck either breaking the story of the AP by outright retreating for the day with the event/map halfway cleared, or the party takes a bunch of 10-min pauses to heal and brute force it into one day with cantrips, FP, etc.
And that's because pf2 could not survive the old per-day power limits, and is leaning onto a half-baked cantrip/FP system as a huge crutch so the per-day design does not collapse. It's clear which one is the problem.
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That manor raid in SoT is the most fresh example that's on my mind. Especially for THE magic school AP that primes players into slot limited classes, it is just not okay that SoT's encounter design is so sloppy. Literally, the only combat encounters that had mixed foe types was when named NPCs were tokens on the map. Every other room was 1-3 of exact same creature. It is honestly baffling that the designers thought that was good enough.
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Back on topic, I would like to emphasize that my suggested spell design for pf3 would put the baseline expectation of each turn of a spellcaster to burn 1 FP. That would put every turn of **baseline** spell power turn at the cost of 10 future minutes of non-combat recovery. That is a lot of cost. And it still provides a very serious martial/caster separation w/ casters mechanically encouraged to end fights quickly.
And while a deep FP pool could help delay such recovery, I fully expect GMs to be (more) realistic with players if they attempt to lower their guard and take a 10-min break.
My hope is only a small portion of FP recovery will happen during 10 or more min pauses; I expect that most FP recovery will take place off-screen when players find non-combat obstacles that slow them down. Such as players needing to repair a gate, descend a cliff, etc. Because guess what? As soon as you make spell power / FP recovery both time-based AND passive, AP designers become able to bake-in recovery before dangerous fights.
Example:
AP designer decides to put an optional lair-type encounter with a beast off on the side of their map. If this is just another room, then it can only upset/widen the expected attrition. If the designer notes that the tunnel to reach the lair takes 30 min at standard exploration speed, then that map is now designed so that 3 FP is recovered both ways.
The same "designed speed-bump" trick can be used before bosses, ambushes, etc. Speed-bumps can be one time, such as enabling the path forward (repair something, solve a riddle, find the path), or tax time every passing, such as maps that have snipped tunnels / non-pictured travel lengths.
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In PF2 or any system with "once per day" limits on combat power (single use slots), it is outright NOT POSSIBLE for the designer to work with or address the attrition issue. If they place a fight on the map, it can only remove slotted spells. The best they can do is plant a "come back tomorrow" sign, which is as crude as it gets.
I would argue that a HUGE amount of Abomination Vault's success with ttrpg newbies (who are not numb to this issue) is owed to the fact that it narratively justifies players being able to retreat for the day before nearly any door, and come back the next day to pick up right where they left off. I've only played Amb Vlts, SoT, and Gatewalkers. In both other APs, if there is a battle map, players are absolutely expected to clear it in one day, else the GM needs to scramble to accommodate the change in narrative.
And each time the AP writers have too much fun filling a map with fights, the players are gritting their teeth and "debating" about skipping that area of the sewer because it looks optional, only to have that guess backward, and have the team limping painfully to the finish line. Now that I've worked up to it, I'll say it outright: Per-day attrition is incompatible with the natural variation in player power efficacy across a whole day of encounters. Complaints about AP difficulty almost always mention long days.
Newbies/low "skill" players will be less efficient w/ their per day resources. Per-day is a "snowball" type system where those that fall behind by expending more than estimated are at a growing disadvantage each additional encounter. This is well know in game design to be a serious source of problems, and why games that understand that critical fulcrum and put a lot of design priority into their checkpoint system (DkS & bonfires) can have such appeal to players of both low and high skill.
In pf2, the single-use-slots issue of snowballing "feast or famine" design is a huge part of why pf2 combat keeps degrading/optimizing into "sudden death explosion" style fights. Every additional turn can cost the casters precious spell slots, so of course they are going to prioritize winning the fights in as few turns as possible. (I know turtle style is viable & potent as well(sometimes))
So, so many perverse incentives and their entirely predictable unfun results are avoided by removing once p day style power limitations.
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In summary:
I say down with the design tyranny of per day combat power. Meaningful daily choices are great, per-day power uses are only to pf's detriment. Attrition is absolutely possible without that.
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A lot of the sustainability thing makes me also curious on how people run PF 2e. Because depending on how a person runs it, you can have running out of slots be a constant problem or not a problem at all. Like for example, a lot of my game usually involves like, a singular fight that entire session, and very rarely do we do dungeons where it's fight after fight after fight. And in those, spell resources are rarely an issue because that's the style of game being run. There's no minimum "Run this many encounters a game to make a balanced experience" at least not one that i've seen, so it feels like if people are noticing players struggling with resource management no matter how much they try to optimize their castings, maybe just cut down the amount of encounters?
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A lot of the sustainability thing makes me also curious on how people run PF 2e. Because depending on how a person runs it, you can have running out of slots be a constant problem or not a problem at all. Like for example, a lot of my game usually involves like, a singular fight that entire session, and very rarely do we do dungeons where it's fight after fight after fight. And in those, spell resources are rarely an issue because that's the style of game being run. There's no minimum "Run this many encounters a game to make a balanced experience" at least not one that i've seen, so it feels like if people are noticing players struggling with resource management no matter how much they try to optimize their castings, maybe just cut down the amount of encounters?
That's why I put an emphasis on Paizo APs.
If the pf2 game system is paired with officially published adventure paths, the design ought to be harmonious with them.
Instead, any time there's more than 4 encounters on a battle map, the AP usually has issues with players feeling that a potential 5th fight, especially if it's a hard boss encounter, is too dangerous to take on in the same day.
While slotted spells are ofc the #1 per-day power, magic items, Battle Medicine, etc all feed into that same attrition problem.
SoT in specific has largely been a "single encounter p day" type AP, but then gets interrupted with errands-turned-battle-maps where the players are expected to get through 5 or 6 in a day. My "new norm" of stockpiling R1 spell scrolls was first started because of SoT doing this in the past, and that manor raid has now taught me I need a much bigger cache of back-up scrolls and hard-bombs.
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More importantly,
There's no minimum "Run this many encounters a game to make a balanced experience" at least not one that i've seen, so it feels like if people are noticing players struggling with resource management no matter how much they try to optimize their castings, maybe just cut down the amount of encounters?
That's not even a deflection to claim the issue does not exist, only a "it's not so painful" type minimization.
That kind of response is exactly what I mean when I say that vets are desensitized to the pain-point. (and I would like to emphasize that it IS a real pain point for those not used to once p day slots)
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Tables should not have to bend over backward to accommodate a 30+ year old design relic. You can design a system where casters still need to budget their in-the-moment power expenditure without there being such pressure to alter the narrative because the events played out where too many fights occurred within the same day by chance.
Again, once-per-day slots are such an obvious detriment/harm to pf2 that it uses a spliced hybrid design of cantrips and Focus Spells that are rather crudely fused atop the old slot-style system. And even that is not enough for players to get through their own APs without serious problems.
Casters at default have 2 or 3 of their top slot, and then 3 more of max - 1. For the entire day. That's crazy design for an open-ended ttrpg to use as a foundational mechanic.
At L6, a Witch has only 9 ranked spells. And as a prepared caster, it's expected for a few of those to be "the wrong spell" that they cannot change.
Even if 6/9 slots have "combat great" spells to cast, that's literally 6 turns of spells for the entire day. That Witch is struggling after 3 fights; there is no way they can reasonably get through 5 or even 6 fights, which is written into APs.
Ever since launch, pf2 has been scrambling to add on ways to help ameliorate that, frankly, absurdly small daily limit. Spell catalysts were a bust, but spellhearts have almost become an expected piece of power budget, and new focus spells keep trickling into the system.
It's super clear that once-per-day slots are painful design relics that really ought be cut loose in a transition to pf3.
I mean if you're going to go that route and just not have spell slots, are you prepared for all spells across to the board to receive massive nerfs to bring their power in line with cantrips?
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That is how the series (after 2 anyway) is built to function, the catch is that the way it's developed over time is that the meta is to do everything the game allows you to do in one day, and there are mechanics you can game to support that-- like rings that gradually regenerate your SP so that you can spam heal your party and just not have to leave, and there's nothing that consumables can't cure, so that and some grinding can trivialize doing the entire thing in one adventuring day.
The only game that really didn't allow you to finish dungeons in a single day was Persona 3, and it wasn't because of attrition, but rather due to its tired / sick status they added if you spent too much time in Tartarus (and this really only applies to OG P3 and FES, because Portable nerfed that mechanic in favor of players and finishing dungeons in a single day was possible there too. The new Reload even removed the mechanic entirely). I think the reason why that subsystem was dropped in subsequent games (and the reason why a ton of games removed attrition) was because it isn't fun tbh.
The appeal of JRPGs and TTRPGs is often roleplaying and their story and characters. Attrition exists because it pretty much was a thing in older games because games used to be designed to be against the player on purpose to make otherwise very short games into something that you could play for weeks or even months. Not even a single videogame dev of today would think of throwing enemies in a dungeon that could cause some incurable status effect that would need you to escape the dungeon to recover and start the dungeon from the beggining because that simply isn't fun and devs have a little more respect for your time than they used to back in the day (mostly because videogames were also meant for children back then, which effectively had all the time in the world to play videogames). TTRPGs as a medium are way older than even videogames, but since TTRPGs are a more "adult" hobby I feel that kinda made it stagnant for way longer and it isn't until now that TTRPGs are making that transition into an attrition-less game (in part because 5e brought a lot of young people into the hobby).
As an adult I don't like to come together with my friends only to spend half of the session healing to continue the adventure like it used to be in 3.x or PF1e. Even if PF2e didn't did away entirely with attrition (which I don't think its bad btw) the only thing that has truly requires an adventuring day to stop to recharge and thus stop the flow of an adventure are spellcasters due to their spells. I don't know if Paizo is going to adapt into a spell point system for PF3e, but I feel some mechanic to recharge spell slots between encounters is going to be a thing because I feel that's were the hobby is going.
I mean if you're going to go that route and just not have spell slots, are you prepared for all spells across to the board to receive massive nerfs to bring their power in line with cantrips?
I can't speak for everyone else here, but I personally would, yes. I don't think cantrips would necessarily have to be the benchmark, given that the Kineticist is a clear example of an at-will magic-user and their impulses are definitely stronger than cantrips, but I would personally prefer a world in which casters were no longer bound by daily attrition to one where they were, but got a handful of moments in the day where their turn was much bigger than anyone else's.
I'd also go as far as to say that a world in which casters are no longer bound by daily attrition or spell slots need not exclude those high moments either: if we keep a mechanic like focus spells where you can recharge in-between encounters, make those above-average in power, and make other effects slightly below-average in compensation, then you'd still get to have those big bursts of power that would let your class shine at their brightest, and every encounter to boot. We all assume that casters need spell slots to have that differentiation from martial classes, but I don't think that's necessarily true, and a game without that subsystem is still one that could make casters feel different from everyone else.
I mean if you're going to go that route and just not have spell slots, are you prepared for all spells across to the board to receive massive nerfs to bring their power in line with cantrips?
If cast w/ 0 FP, then yes, of course.
I think the healthiest thing to do is not only to require multiple FP to boost spells up to max potency, but for the genuinely 0 FP option to be sub-par, and certainly no more potent than current cantrips.
In pf2, as crazy as it is, cantrips like Electic Arc can genuinely do more dmg than slotted spells. That causes all kinds of player weirdness in reaction to that.
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I think a good base spell design that could work with an "expect to burn FP to get to base spell power" would be for spell text to include:
Heighten: this is mostly unchanged, spell guidance for how they scale with increasing Rank. Note that spending FP now affects the end Rank.
Focused: this entry can keep portions of the spell's power to only activate when any # of FP is spent casting the spell.
This new idea is the main tool for all spells to have "cantrip versions" that keep their identity intact, but power limited. Something like Fireball could start as a 2x2 burst when cast at 0 FP, gaining its usual AoE, airburst mechanic, etc, in its "Focused:" entry.
Amp: not required, but it would be super great if some/most spells came with their own specific meta-magics listed that can cost FP to achieve. If all spellcasters have & use FP at baseline, this becomes a new possibility enabled by the system change.
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In that system, cantrips as a concept would become L 0 spells that do not hold much, if any, power behind a Focused: entry, Heighten smoothly, and therefore are comparatively friendly to being cast w/ 0 FP.
Focus spells would be more akin to "always memorized spells" that you have at your disposal every day. And if they also cost FP to cast at baseline power, then Class Feats/Features have much more power budget room to be generous when granting said focus spells.
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And yes, having a selection of daily memorized spells still allows for the potential loss/expending of a memory slot, preventing it's casting for the remainder of the day.
Once max spell power is completely separate from what spells you can cast in the moment, it's not nearly as big a balance issue to burn out a memory/spell slot for the rest of the day.
I think the thing about encounter design misses that the main issue is the psychological hurdle of "If I do this now, I can't do it again today/can only do it again a couple more times" because it forces you to constantly figure out "is this worth it" in ambiguous cases because you don't know what's coming in the fight after this one. Along the lines of the ranger dropping favored enemy/terrain in PF2, it's just good when your game design does not encourage players to try to predict the future.
Like if you gave Wizards an option to spend a focus point for an extra use of drain bonded object that would be a huge improvement for sustainability since you can always get your spell back.
I think the thing about encounter design misses that the main issue is the psychological hurdle of "If I do this now, I can't do it again today/can only do it again a couple more times" because it forces you to constantly figure out "is this worth it" in ambiguous cases because you don't know what's coming in the fight after this one. Along the lines of the ranger dropping favored enemy/terrain in PF2, it's just good when your game design does not encourage players to try to predict the future.
Like if you gave Wizards an option to spend a focus point for an extra use of drain bonded object that would be a huge improvement for sustainability since you can always get your spell back.
Wouldnt that be the most powerful use of a focus point in the game by far?
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Because depending on how a person runs it, you can have running out of slots be a constant problem or not a problem at all.
From my experience it's both: Players never run out of slots but always think about it and downplay their character because of that.
Running out of spell slots is not really an issue. Ending the day with remaining spell slots is the real issue, as it means you downplayed your character.
I mean if you're going to go that route and just not have spell slots, are you prepared for all spells across to the board to receive massive nerfs to bring their power in line with cantrips?If cast w/ 0 FP, then yes, of course.
I think the healthiest thing to do is not only to require multiple FP to boost spells up to max potency, but for the genuinely 0 FP option to be sub-par, and certainly no more potent than current cantrips.
In pf2, as crazy as it is, cantrips like Electic Arc can genuinely do more dmg than slotted spells. That causes all kinds of player weirdness in reaction to that.
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I think a good base spell design that could work with an "expect to burn FP to get to base spell power" would be for spell text to include:
Heighten: this is mostly unchanged, spell guidance for how they scale with increasing Rank. Note that spending FP now affects the end Rank.
Focused: this entry can keep portions of the spell's power to only activate when any # of FP is spent casting the spell.
This new idea is the main tool for all spells to have "cantrip versions" that keep their identity intact, but power limited. Something like Fireball could start as a 2x2 burst when cast at 0 FP, gaining its usual AoE, airburst mechanic, etc, in its "Focused:" entry.
Amp: not required, but it would be super great if some/most spells came with their own specific meta-magics listed that can cost FP to achieve. If all spellcasters have & use FP at baseline, this becomes a new possibility enabled by the system change.
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In that system, cantrips as a concept would become L 0 spells that do not hold much, if any, power behind a Focused: entry, Heighten smoothly, and therefore are comparatively friendly to being cast w/ 0 FP.
Focus spells would be more akin to "always memorized spells" that you have at your disposal every day. And if they also cost FP to cast at baseline power, then Class Feats/Features have much more power budget room to be generous...
This doesn't seem to solve anything. You're just taking the so called problem of "I have only these high level slots and then i'm worthless" and turning into "I only have 3 spells I can cast and then im worthless".
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Right now in pf2, even the small 10 min pauses can often break the suspension of disbelief, but as of now they do not seriously threaten game balance. More than not threaten it, I would say that the balance of pf2, at minimum, seriously encourages the 10 min pauses.
I think it's even critical in certain circumstances. If I knew ahead of time a GM didn't like allowing rests between encounters, I probably wouldn't play a psychic, their gameplay experience just goes into the toilet if they don't have ready access to their focus spells.
It gets worse when you remember than 10m is an interval, not necessarily the total rest time. If you want to heal multiple people or regain extra focus points it can easily turn into a 20m, 30m, even an hour break.
It's to the point where a lot of the groups I run into with new players or new GMs have essentially just houseruled away the time component entirely and just let everyone regain their focus points and get a round of healing and simply pretend no meaningful time has passed. Like it's actually surprising how often I see that houserule being completely independently developed by radically different groups.
TBH I kind of wonder where Paizo came up with that 10m number, because it's a very inconvenient time interval for storytelling purposes, which somewhat suggests they're meant to be used sparingly, but the game also just frankly doesn't run well if you play that way either.
I mean if you're going to go that route and just not have spell slots, are you prepared for all spells across to the board to receive massive nerfs to bring their power in line with cantrips?I can't speak for everyone else here, but I personally would, yes. I don't think cantrips would necessarily have to be the benchmark, given that the Kineticist is a clear example of an at-will magic-user and their impulses are definitely stronger than cantrips, but I would personally prefer a world in which casters were no longer bound by daily attrition to one where they were, but got a handful of moments in the day where their turn was much bigger than anyone else's.
I'd also go as far as to say that a world in which casters are no longer bound by daily attrition or spell slots need not exclude those high moments either: if we keep a mechanic like focus spells where you can recharge in-between encounters, make those above-average in power, and make other effects slightly below-average in compensation, then you'd still get to have those big bursts of power that would let your class shine at their brightest, and every encounter to boot. We all assume that casters need spell slots to have that differentiation from martial classes, but I don't think that's necessarily true, and a game without that subsystem is still one that could make casters feel different from everyone else.
What's the point of being unbound by attrition? Like, realistically, how many encounters between long resting are you actually want to play in a session that casters need to lose their ability to nova or provide stronger utility in exchange for like, what? Being able to run 10 encounters in a row? Is that honestly what people even want when playing this game? More Combat?
Wouldnt that be the most powerful use of a focus point in the game by far?
It would, currently, yes. But PF3 should have casters structured around having some way of getting spent resources back in case the player made a mistake or situations are desperate or similar.
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What's the point of being unbound by attrition? Like, realistically, how many encounters between long resting are you actually want to play in a session that casters need to lose their ability to nova or provide stronger utility in exchange for like, what? Being able to run 10 encounters in a row?
The point is that the number should be determined by the needs of the party and narrative design, more than by the design flaws of a specific class. Reducing reliance on attrition means I can more effectively design shorter or longer adventuring days catered to the story being told, without having to worry about completely obliterating game balance or making someone's day miserable.
Is that honestly what people even want when playing this game? More Combat?
I mean, the total number of combats doesn't have to change at all. Nor is the rate of real-time combat in any way really connected to the rate of in-game rests. Plus not every encounter or scenario is even going to be combat in the first place.
I can't help but wonder if what people would want is like, wave casting but with like 3 or 4 slots over just the 2. Because I can't image just having like, 15 spells in total like how Kinetcisit works, or just having cantrips and the psyhics amp feature is really satisfying to most casters.
Maybe this is my own bias with casters but I like spellslots. I like being able to punch above and bending the rules that spellslots allow. Feels like trading that for just spamming damage spell is trading the bounty of the ocean of a lagoon of cheap tricks. I've gotten tons of usage out of my lower slots being for utility options or evergreen spells vs the big heavy hitters of my higher level spellslots, and cantrips do decent enough that I don't feel outpaced by my fellow players.
I've never had more than like, 3 encounters in a game and I don't see myself wanting any more than 3. I don't see the so called value of "You can cast all the time" when that kind of game would be absolutely boring and soul crushing to play through for me. I just do not see this as a selling point and I do not get why this is the be all and end all measurement for if a caster is good or bad.
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What's the point of being unbound by attrition? Like, realistically, how many encounters between long resting are you actually want to play in a session that casters need to lose their ability to nova or provide stronger utility in exchange for like, what? Being able to run 10 encounters in a row? Is that honestly what people even want when playing this game? More Combat?
Here's a little design problem for you: I run games of Pathfinder at work with colleagues. The sessions I run are extremely short, i.e. 90 minutes long, and because my players do this once a week and are coming right out of other mentally engaging tasks, none of us really want to be bogged down by bookkeeping, so whenever I can I tend to let the party rest and be fully refreshed for the next session. At most, we do one encounter a session. However, on some weekends, I also go to a friend's and we play Pathfinder pretty much all day: we hunker down with food and drinks, and sit down for a session that will usually last about 12 hours. We'll sometimes rest mid-session, but often the pacing doesn't really allow this and we want to get as much done as we can on those rare days where we all get to do these marathons, so we might end up doing 4 or more encounters in a day, plus other challenges that may require one or more spells. Tell me: how do you balance daily resources on a player character so that they work equally well in micro- and mega-sessions like those?
The answer is: you don't, because you can't. In those very short sessions, casters are really above the curve, because they get to have all the power of top-rank slots with none of the long-term resource management, and in those marathon sessions, they don't shine nearly as bright, because they have to use their every spell slot sparingly. The martials, by contrast, don't deal with this problem at all, and keep trucking on at a consistent pace throughout. The problem with any kind of daily attrition system is that it assumes a certain amount of challenge per day that requires resource expenditure to overcome successfully, which in turn imposes its own constraints: too little of that challenge, which can easily happen in a short adventuring day, and your casters can overshadow everyone else by outputting far too much power above everyone else's means. Too much of it, and your casters will suffer.
All of this I think highlights the flaw in your reasoning here: you seem to be reluctant to switch out of attrition on casters on the assumption that its advocates all want long sessions with lots of combat, but that's not true at all. I don't want to run tons of combat a day if I can avoid it, and although it'd be nice for those casters to not struggle as much in those twelve-hour days, I'm actually much more interested in those one-and-a-half hour adventuring days that I play much more often. I'd like to run tiny sessions with perhaps one encounter without the casters taking up all of the limelight, and it'd help to not need to bookkeep spell slots in-between sessions in case the party doesn't rest. I also don't want to inflate the difficulty of that encounter per day just to match up to the party's casters, because that hurts the martial classes. In a world without daily attrition, that'd be easy as pie, but that's not what we have with this system.
What's the point of being unbound by attrition? Like, realistically, how many encounters between long resting are you actually want to play in a session that casters need to lose their ability to nova or provide stronger utility in exchange for like, what? Being able to run 10 encounters in a row?The point is that the number should be determined by the needs of the party and narrative design, more than by the design flaws of a specific class. Reducing reliance on attrition means I can more effectively design shorter or longer adventuring days catered to the story being told, without having to worry about completely obliterating game balance or making someone's day miserable.
Is that honestly what people even want when playing this game? More Combat?I mean, the total number of combats doesn't have to change at all. Nor is the rate of real-time combat in any way really connected to the rate of in-game rests. Plus not every encounter or scenario is even going to be combat in the first place.
Would that mean a GM assigns a story segment a rating of some kind and that rating determines the number of spells a caster would have as a baseline for that segment?
A story segment being a series of exploration/encounters that make up the scene
This doesn't seem to solve anything. You're just taking the so called problem of "I have only these high level slots and then i'm worthless" and turning into "I only have 3 spells I can cast and then im worthless".
I get that it's been a big thread, but it would be nice if you read the thing so I don't clog this up by repeating the presented mechanics. (all numbers are rough, it's the core mechanic of spending/recharging Magic Points that's important here)
* Spells would have no limit on # of casts per day. The total number of memorized spells would still increase w/ level, and reaching the minimum R would unlock new spells as pf2 normal.
* Starting FP pool would be 10, and would increase to 20 by max char level.
* Different classes would have their own mechanics and ways to interact w/ FP, EX: cleric having a separate small point pool replenished w/ active prayer, only usable w/ god spells + Heal. EX: Bard refunding 1 FP if paired Performance was a Crit Success.
* Casting a spell would add the choice to spend FP to heighten the spell.
* * 0 FP would make spell roughly pf2 max R-2. [whatever is thought to be below spell power norm]
* * 1 FP burn would put the spell at max R-1. [whatever is thought to be at spell power norm]
* * 3 FP burn to get the spell up to max R. [whatever is thought to be above spell power norm]
* Those 3 heighten tiers would also affect the spell DC by one each. This shifts some power into the less-visible DC; this is a designer pref thing though, static DC across all H may be their pref.
* Other metamagic effects can cost FP instead of actions, enabling yet more spell power in exchange for more FP. Including class-specific specialization.
* FP recovers by 1 each 10 min outside of combat mode, but is now done passively, NOT as a "refocus activity" this is mandatory to minimize the "water break" issue.
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Again, by default, all spells would have unlimited castings per day. But casting without FP burn would be "below par" in terms of budgeted power.
Things like magical healing could be kept in check w/ a stacking diminishing return debuff (that can just be a -minus on the Heighten), etc.
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@Teridax - I’m a little confused by your use of the word “time” in explaining these different sessions. I get that the 90 minute work sessions allow for the casters to essentially be ready at all times with everything, but in the 12 hour sessions *if* you allowed the party to rest up/refocus as per Squiggit’s “fairly common houserule” (and to provide another data pojnt, I come across it also, even in PbP where time is not exactly of the essence) then couldn’t your weekend party also operate like that? I don’t understand how “pacing” in a 12 hours session makes resting problematic. How long, in real time, does it take to enact a particular 10/20/30 minute in-game rest?
I get that in a longer more structured campaign there can be impediments and tension that prevent the party from being able to rest, but the differences in the playtime seems artificially enacted, and could even be flipped, right? The 90 minute workplace party forced to play a tight ongoing slog over several sessions with no rests; and the 12 hour gang tiptoeing through tulip fields and resting comfortably in between combats?
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I mean, there's also things like "the party is on an ocean voyage, they might get attacked by pirates or a sea monster on a given day, but they're not going to get attacked over and over again on a single day" that means sometimes the narrative requires the number of fights/day to not be especially high.
There's also an issue where "the party is trying to liberate a captive from a stronghold", where the number of fights is in part going to be affected by the approach the PCs take (and also how successful they are at it.) Like if they do reconnaissance and enter in the right spot, proceed stealthily, and get in and out quickly that's going to result necessarily in fewer fights than "they decide to kick down the front gate and fight every guard." You can never assume the PCs are going to do the thing you thought was sensible and obvious, after all. You also want to acknowledge player choices in deciding their approach whether they want to be sneaky and efficient or noisy and belligerent and those are things that probably should not have the same results.
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I've never had more than like, 3 encounters in a game and I don't see myself wanting any more than 3. I don't see the so called value of "You can cast all the time" when that kind of game would be absolutely boring and soul crushing to play through for me. I just do not see this as a selling point and I do not get why this is the be all and end all measurement for if a caster is good or bad.
This is why it is important to base the discussion in the official content that Paizo pairs with the gamesystem.
There are many APs that present narrative events where it would break things for players to retreat and sleep. These very often go over 3 encounters per day. Any AP map that has more than 1 fight, it seems that such a map has 3 fights at minimum from what I have seen.
It's fine to only do 3 yourself, but when talking about the topic on the forums, we all have to consider what the published reality is for Paizo content.
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Moreover, it is a huge burden and unneeded constraint for GMs/ storytellers to have to consider the days as demanded in a once p day slot system.
If a homebrew campaign has the party raid a big castle in the morning and does 4 fights, the GM is forced to worry about remaining spells for the rest of that narrative day, and flounder for an excuse as to why the party can't do the next thing until tomorrow.
The entire system lacks flexibility in ways that is not needed.
You can design a system to still budget/constrain spell power with a resource without it being a per-day slot system.
@Teridax - I’m a little confused by your use of the word “time” in explaining these different sessions. I get that the 90 minute work sessions allow for the casters to essentially be ready at all times with everything, but in the 12 hour sessions *if* you allowed the party to rest up/refocus as per Squiggit’s “fairly common houserule” (and to provide another data pojnt, I come across it also, even in PbP where time is not exactly of the essence) then couldn’t your weekend party also operate like that?
The use of "time" here describes real time, not in-game time. While I do run the 90-minute work sessions, in the 12-hour sessions I am a player, not the GM, and the GM has no knowledge of Squiggit's houserule nor the intention to implement any houserules or homebrew at their table other than their own setting.
I don’t understand how “pacing” in a 12 hours session makes resting problematic. How long, in real time, does it take to enact a particular 10/20/30 minute in-game rest?
Does your GM let your party simply fall unconscious on the street or in the middle of a monster-filled dungeon and rest for a full 8 hours? Because in the 12-hour sessions, our party is doing stuff across the entire length of an in-game day, with one encounter or scene leading to the next, and the GM has structured the adventuring day this way because they know we're sat together to play a big session. We might pause in meatspace for meals and comfort breaks, but it is otherwise full-on.
I get that in a longer more structured campaign there can be impediments and tension that prevent the party from being able to rest, but the differences in the playtime seems artificially enacted, and could even be flipped, right? The 90 minute workplace party forced to play a tight ongoing slog over several sessions with no rests; and the 12 hour gang tiptoeing through tulip fields and resting comfortably in between combats?
Yes, those differences absolutely could be flipped, which leads back to the point being made: there's this unspoken Goldilocks zone of challenge that an adventuring day is expected to fall into in order for the casters' resources to be expended at just the right pace, and while there's a fairly decent margin to operate, it's still fairly easy to fall out of that happy medium down either extreme and end up unbalancing casters next to martials one way or the other. Your inversion hasn't worked that way for me given how it's generally tended to feel more natural to make resting in-game coincide with the end of a session, but I suppose you could hypothetically subject your 90-minute sessions to constant bookkeeping, or sit your players down for 12 hours of mostly nothing.
I'm pretty sure as soon as casters aren't limited by attrition you just go right back to martials being at best meat shields.
Or they lose all of their utility and most of their AoE.
While it requires designers to set & pick actual benchmark values, you can have the powerful spells as limited as they are right now.
If a max R spell costs 30% of their total FP, that's three big spells then empty. However many big & small spells you think one should be able to cast without recharging, and however long you think that time should take, splitting that away from "once per day" is the core improvement.
The largest difference is the design of battle maps / dungeons would actually need to consider checkpoints and either signal that the whole thing is expected to be cleared in one go, or to place time-costing roadblocks when the designer wants the FP to recharge a bit.
The current status quo of "sure, just take 10 or 30 min to heal up to full. The goblins in the next room are going to wait for you" is what's got to go.
No form of attrition system can deal with that degree of absurd player/GM behavior.
If verisimilitude dictates that you actually need to do a few fights back to back, else you get ambushed during the pause, then a "trickle recharge" type magic system really does work.
I'm pretty sure as soon as casters aren't limited by attrition you just go right back to martials being at best meat shields.
Or they lose all of their utility and most of their AoE.
You can still limit casters with attrition, it just doesn't have to be a one way thing. Like you should be able to buy back "spell slots" or similar by spending other resources, something like a burn mechanic that lowers your max HP or something else you care about (saves, skills, etc.) for the remainder of the day could work.
I think most d20 players are pretty attached to the basic concept of "slots per day" spellcasting. And I think most GMs would like the classes to be balanced against one another, irrespective of whether you're fighting once a day or ten times, so they don't have to change their narrative just to be fair to martials (or casters).
Maybe the least disruptive thing would be to give Fighters (etc) in future editions stamina points (or similar) to spend, to power up their attacks / get extra attacks / inflict status effects. To fight at maximum strength, they would have to spend stamina points at a similar rate to casters burning through their best slots. In this system all characters could go nova to a similar extent, and all characters would have to conserve resources to fight multiple encounters in a day.
The main downside would be for players who want to play a simple character that doesn't require any tough decisions...
You can still limit casters with attrition, it just doesn't have to be a one way thing. Like you should be able to buy back "spell slots" or similar by spending other resources, something like a burn mechanic that lowers your max HP or something else you care about (saves, skills, etc.) for the remainder of the day could work.I'm pretty sure as soon as casters aren't limited by attrition you just go right back to martials being at best meat shields.
Or they lose all of their utility and most of their AoE.
Isn't that just attrition by another name though? You're still spending something else that depletes, and you presumably need to get back by the next day.
What's more, unless you scale back what spells can do, then you're trading things a caster probably doesn't care as much about for the coolest things in your kit; you wind up with attrition that means less in the long run. A choice someone will always make isn't really a choice.
Yall, the entire point is so that a caster who fights in the morning could get back to 100% and fight again later in the same day. So that GMs & AP designers can still meaningfully do short term attrition via multiple fight maps without needing to worry about exactly when the caster sleeps between maps.
Like, yes, casters could use their top slots again, that's the whole point, lol.
You have to determine what the intended goal of the attrition system is and why it's there. In this case, it is so that turn-by-turn, casters need to choose when to conserve FP and cast a lower R spell, and when to explode w/ a max R spell. This FP burn also has lasting attrition between combats on the same battle map / immediate series of encounters/fights. If the party fully leaves the danger zone for a few hours, then the table can handwave recharging to say the caster is back to full. That's the designed goal of such a magic-point-to-spell-rank system, lol.
Again, pf2e already knows that unlimited spells are the future, hence the crude fusion of two other types of unlimited spells, cantrips & focus spells, atop once p day slots.
pf2e also allows low R utility spells to essentially be infinite thanks to scrolls, wands, and other items that carry spells like prayer beads.
All those items are essentially "suffer this item hassle for more spells"
If the base function of a scroll or a new type of spell item was instead to override your daily memory slot with that written spell, using a consumable to tweak your daily prep, it would be great way to keep said item extremely useful while completely neutering the balance-breaking effect of gp just outright buying magical power.
Other magical edits that would need to accompany infinite use spells, like a stacking magical healing debuff, already are kinda needed in pf2 in large part due to such scroll abuse. As far as I know, R1 Heal scrolls are still the most gp / HP efficient way to heal outside combat.
Personally I hope they standardize the mechanics into a single system, while keeping the full range from 'every round' spells all the way up to 'rare big boom' spells. Just give everything a cooldown trait. So instead of tracking slots and focus points separately and then having cantrips which work on a third, different, 'any time' mechanic, all spells just have a 'cooldown.' Some have a 1-rd cooldown, some have a 10-min (or whatever...5 min, 1 min) cooldown, and some have a 1-day (or whatever...1 hr, 8hr) cooldown.
"1a, 1-rd cooldown" would be an excellent improvement for current cantrips.
Yeah, there's loads of ways to implement such a system.
My personal pref for design is to "bite the bullet" up front w/ the foundation, having just a tad of complexity in that core, so that the rest of system can play with that guaranteed core.
I do prefer a point burn, as it's super flexible while only being a single number a player needs to track.
One quick note is that people often forget that cooldowns need to be tracked. It's actually way more of a hassle to have abilities that each have their own cooldown. Any time you instead burn recharging points, you can set the time recovery to the exact same cost while the player/table is still tracking and modifying a single number. (sometimes an independent cooldown makes sense, can't speak in absolutes. Your example of a within fight CD measured in a turn or 2 fits that bill. There could be a semi-common trait for spells that adds the function of giving them a standard cooldown.)
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And thanks to dice, the devs can rely on even paper players to have a perfectly fine fallback tool to do simple addition | subtraction upon, even when that could be every turn.
And a Magic Point / Focus Point baseline does not remove the option for cooldown mechanics! While I wouldn't implement this as-is, here's an example of a 1 p day ability that demonstrates how you can play w/ a point spend heighten foundation.
Scholarly Surge:
[wizard] [scholastic] [metamagic] [concentrate]1 Action
You unleash your personal mastery over the specific magics of your study, and crackle with arcane energy. While this effect persists, any spell you cast that matches your area of study is heightened one more rank than normal for the MP spent, not exceeding your maximum spell rank.
Every turn after the first, you must expend 1 more MP than the prior turn to sustain this brief surge of power as a free action; 1 for the second turn, 2 for the third, and so on. The continual effect does not count toward your normal 1 metamagic per turn limit.
Once the surge fades, you cannot use it again until you receive sleep rest.
If you have Expert Spellcasting, you may use this power to cast a memorized spell 1 rank higher than your normal maximum. If done, the effect ends immediately afterward, you sacrifice the day's use of that spell memory slot, and your maximum MP is reduced by 1 until you receive sleep rest.
Adding just a bit more complexity to the core via a point spend/recharge just gives so much more room to invent/play with fun mechanics.
How a short-term spell attrition system is implemented is up to Paizo, but my weight is behind a simple point pool being the best "complexity burden : design space" tradeoff.
Don't forget all the other non-offense comparables.
Casters being low HP, low ___, compared to martials does matter.
Any system benefits from apples : oranges niches, and pf3 would be no different.
Casters needing 2A to be combat-effective could be more important in a pf3 that puts more tools into foe kits to harry the PCs in less "HP minus" ways.
Things like next-turn AoEs to send the PCs running, more Trips against PCs, etc, all affect martials and casters differently. Though I agree that it would be healthy for a point-burn system for the 0 burn option to be set decisively under martial damage, while the slow 1 point per turn burn would be the "break even" spend, and the 3+ burn is where casters would be expected to exceed martials.
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Overall, I think the #1 thing to keep in mind is the current pf2 design. The pf3 system cannot be perfect, but it doesn't have to. It needs only be a significant improvement to pf2.
And in pf2, all those "one fight per day" encounters are... rather common, and it's easy for players to know they do not need to conserve.
My L10 Gatewalkers party essentially has no idea what the hazard level of our encounter rolls is supposed to be, because every time we fight something on this crazy long expedition, the casters are dumping their max R slots and nuking each daily fight.
This is the same Gatewalkers party that has barely limped through other marathon battle map days.
It's kinda easy to say that pf2 is in a state where it's the worst of both worlds from an attrition perspective already.