| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
If you had to guess, in general, how many 10 minute rests do you typically take:
1. Between moderate encounters?
2. After an extreme encounter?
3. Over the course of a whole level?
If you had to turn in a token for each 10 minute rest, how many tokens would be enough to last you for one whole level (assuming standard experience point leveling)?
If I look at it from Trivial an Extreme ends I might be able to bound the problem:
For Trivial: My estimate is that you need at least one 10 minute break per encounter as a baseline, so that focus point reliant characters can get a focus point back. Add another 10 minute break to allow for one round of healing in addition to a refocus activity. With 25 potential trivial encounters over a level, that's 50 ten minute break tokens.
For Extreme: Start with 3, assuming all players need to refocus their whole pool. Then let's assume two PCs need to be healed from zero to full with a slowish healing source (Lay on Hands). That changes as HP pools change over the 20 levels, so looking at around level 10, we can estimate around 6 Lay on Hands to get to full. So, 15 ten minute breaks per Extreme encounter. With a potential ~6 extreme encounters for a full level, you'd need 90 ten minute break tokens.
So, imagining that there's roughly 12 encounters per level of varying difficulties and you got on average 5.5 tokens per encounter, you should have plenty of ten minute breaks.
Does that align with your experience at all?
|
It varies.
The group typically takes however long it takes to rest when there isn't time or locale-based threats and pressure such as during any exploration style phase of the game such as traveling roads, wilderness, and the like.
In situations where the party is decidedly within enemy territory, be it a dungeon, a building, or part of town controlled by their opponents factions or otherwise is generally populated by those who would go on the offense if the group is located then the party will either use their daily/consumable resources to recover quickly to patch up and continue if things aren't dire or in situations where they absolutely need to take a full 10 minute (or longer) rest they retreat to a safe distance or hole up somewhere that they know (or believe) is defensible/hidden from enemy eyes.
So, yeah, it always depends on the circumstances but I will say that the group absolutely does not have the habit of sitting down for a 10-15 minute breather between every encounter or combat when they're within spitting distance of other enemies. The rule of thumb, if I had to give one, would be that if it would take less than the required 10 minutes that a real short rest requires of leisurely walking around in a place the enemy is comfortable/at-home being in for the party to be discovered (much less the far more common situation where their presence is known inside of such a place after the first handful of encounters when the entire are should be on high alert and probably at least actively snooping on the group) they will not even attempt to rest there as that is a recipe for being ambushed without your guard up, weapons drawn, or even remotely ready to act in a tactical manner.
Over the course of twenty levels, I don't think we've ever used more than three in between encounters in our Agents of Edgewatch campaign.
More often than not, it's two.
One to heal, then another to top off and do things like loot, identify loot, and equip the loot. Edit: *Ahem* Evidence, not loot. XD
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
The baseline assumption is that everyone is always at full health going into a fight, and that's how our group plays. So however long it takes to get everyone back up to full (or maybe 95% if we're just talking being down like 5 or less hp).
Remember, the party is still (probably) spending limited resources like spell slots so even if they're at full health, there is still decreased combat capabilities for the party as a whole.
And if you're going to have the party enter combats at less than full health, you have to "compensate" for that, although there aren't exact rules for that impact.
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
Two of the groups I play with have just stopped tracking rests. Refocusing and a round of medicine/other healing checks are just things that happen.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Depends of the party, level and experience of the players and place.
Most of the time will be as many as it takes to be full.
With more experienced players and higher level they might go to the buff rush. Cast Heroism and other 10 minutes buffs and try to chain 2-3 encounters to take advantage of it.
Refocus and heal everybody, however long that takes.
But how long does that usually take on average?
After every encounter, unless there's something urgent. Most of the time I even treat the time between encounters, whatever it would otherwise be, as much less than it really is. For example, if the party would need 30 minutes to fully heal and recover their focus spells, I usually handweave it to be a few minutes. Why? Because I feel encounters are designed to be engaged at full or near full HP and specially focus spells feel like a "once per encounter" kind of thing, and at least in this system, I kinda feel I'm bashing on my players if I don't let them rest properly.
I'm also being particularly permissive in my current Stolen Fate campaign because we started in the Begginer Box, then into Abomination Vaults, and then into Stolen Fate. Two players decided to retire their characters, a warpriest cleric and a druid that took increases into Medicine, and while one of them now plays into a chalice thaumaturge they struggle heavily to be at full HP between encounters, which are obviously appropiately deadly for a party of such level.
If I were strict with healing times I feel I would have TPK'ed them a long time ago at this point.
Two of the groups I play with have just stopped tracking rests. Refocusing and a round of medicine/other healing checks are just things that happen.
I do similar as a GM. If the players are going to stop and heal rest at all, I just estimate a time for healing to full based on how much resource-free or renewable resource healing the characters can bring. I don't make them roll for it unless there is actually some sort of risk involved like low level using Treat Wounds without Assurance.
I don't think I have ever estimated more than 3x 10 minutes.
Tracking time that fine grained isn't something that I feel like tracking. I don't think it adds to the story in most cases - though there are certainly exceptions.
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
The always having resting as an option thing is tempo and tone dependent so its not a given.
It depends on the story and the players.
If the players are not in sync with the story then they could miss out on objectives taking a 30 min rest instead of 10.
At the same time I am not throwing a severe encounter at them when the situation (and tempo i set) doesnt allow them to go into it with enough resources to where I am setting them up to fail.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
I tell my parties that barring something unforeseen they'll get a single 10-minute rest guaranteed. I take that as being the same time in previous D20 games that we used to search the bodies and for secret doors.
They could certainly have more than one, but it's never assured, and they would typically not get 3 or 4.
I think if you give too many all the time players start to expect it, then you get that time when you can't rest at all - and those do happen when a story calls for it - players aren't prepared to deal with that.
|
I treat refocusing/Treat Injury RAW (I think?) and just allow it as an Exploration Activity. In a Party of four, You might have two refocusing, one Treating Injuries, and maybe one Examining something using Perception or another Skill right after a fight. We rarely 'Stop to Rest' excepting for a long rest.
Am I missing something?
The one comment I'd give on the OPs original estimate, is, in general, I expect the refocusing and the healing time tracks to run in parallel most of the the time.
In the vast majority of my games, the heavy in-combat focus-spells users have not been the healers (via medicine or focus point healing). So that would cut 1-3 10-minute rests out of your estimates for the different severity fights.
The one comment I'd give on the OPs original estimate, is, in general, I expect the refocusing and the healing time tracks to run in parallel most of the the time.
In the vast majority of my games, the heavy in-combat focus-spells users have not been the healers (via medicine or focus point healing). So that would cut 1-3 10-minute rests out of your estimates for the different severity fights.
You're probably right, but I wanted to be extra generous to make sure someone with Medicine and a non-compatible refocus activity could be assured of not getting boned.
As for an update on the thread as a whole:
I have several people who do not track time in 10 minute intervals after combat and therefore cannot answer the question. This might be a very common behavior.
I have several others who underscore that AT LEAST one 10 minute break is pretty much guaranteed.
And a couple people have a typical cluster between two or three 10 minute breaks between combats.
I am getting the sense that five ten minute breaks per encounter on average is potentially overshooting by a fair bit, but it's hard to tell since so many people don't actually track it. I think resting for the night and 1 encounter days are throwing things off a bit too.
To be clear, I'm not trying to make a statement about anything. I literally just want to know ROUGHLY how many 10 minute breaks would be necessary to make the game work.
My experience has been that post level 4 or so (aka, post Continual Recovery and a decent Medicine modifier), 30 minutes is usually enough to heal up fully after most fights. So in your hypothetical token scenario I'd say 5.5 average is overly generous and an average around 3 would be better.
I'm tempted to crunch the numbers of my current groups to verify, but that could take a bit.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
The parties I play with and GM for play very differently it seems.
There is rarely a standard. It is not uncommon in outdoor exploration adventuring to only have 1 encounter a day. Sometimes that one encounter is a group of 3 or 4 encounters smashed into close proximity to each other, and those usually have to be handled as one encounter, so we will often burn healing resources that only take seconds instead of 10 minutes. Those adventuring days typically have 0 ten minute rests and can make up anywhere from about 15% of encounters to 75% of encounters we face.
Pretty much anytime we are looking for someone specifically or there might be a threat of violence being enacted against a prisoner or something like that, we choose to rest as few times as possible and will burn a lot of longer term resources to make that possible. Sometimes, if we are out of those resources, we will pull back and regroup which might mean some 10 minute rests, but if we are in an urban environment, it might mean running back to town and buying some more scrolls or bombs or other resources we realized are going to make the next couple of encounters a lot easier as well.
Other times, we might be facing a dungeon that has divided up encounter spaces pretty well. When that is the case, we often spend several exploration units investigating rooms as well as trying to heal, refocus, repair, or engage in other activities. So sometimes, where there is time, we will take an hour or longer between rooms to make sure we have found everything there is to find and that we understand where in the overall dungeon this room exists from a tactical and ecological stand point.
For example, after breaking through a dungeon's preliminary point of entrance/our only known way of getting out, we might set traps around doors we are not going to open first, even something as minor as casting an alarm spell, so we don't end up trapped in the dungeon.
I agree than for trivial/low I'd expect a single 10 minute exploration round, for healing, refocusing, looting, follow-up on investigating the location unless the party is on a known ticking clock, in which case they'd might push their luck. ( Or use consumables/ranked spells)
For a moderate than went a little against them. Three 10- minutes rounds usually can get a party ready to again,but might require spending some resources. Probably 20 minutes for a more average outcome
For anything harder than moderate, probably closer to an hour before the party will feel ready to move on
When trying to design encounters, keeping these time periods in mind can be useful for how to plan ticking clocks. Or planning how much other investigation/identification time makes sense to put in the after combat resolution portion. Give the non healers something to engage with in the room
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
If you had to guess, in general, how many 10 minute rests do you typically take:
As many as I can/need.
If there's no time pressure, we put the whole party to full hp. If there's a time pressure then we get as many 10-minute rests than the time pressure allows us to get.To be clear, I'm not trying to make a statement about anything. I literally just want to know ROUGHLY how many 10 minute breaks would be necessary to make the game work.
In my opinion it's very party-dependent. Between a 10 Wis medic and a Chirurgeon Alchemist, there'll be a degree of magnitude between the out of combat healing output, so you have to expect extreme differences between groups. I don't think you can find a game-wide answer that will satisfy every parties (unless you choose a very large one).
For most encounters, my group takes a 20 - 30 minute rest if time allows as we typically do 1 - 2 moderate encounters a session. If a severe encounter comes up, it's often the end of session and folks go take their long rest and heal up to full over that time.
Sometimes I may make it known there's a time limit and only offer a chance for a 1 - 2 10 minute rests. However, the groups I run games for often have a medic with Continual Recovery and Ward Medic and then someone with focus healing too, so that's rarely an issue either and they're able to get back up to full.
Over the course of a level is difficult, but my groups tends to level up every 2 - 4 sessions, so with my best estimate, they're probably doing about 12 - 20 rests in that time.
|
|
This can vary pretty wildly by the group makeup as well. In my current game we don't have any true healers(A bard is able to give a little and battle medicine can help each character once a day) so we tend to have a longer period between fights of him patching people up. But with a group that keeps up the healing better during the fights or has a few people with focus abilities that can heal, just one or two ten minute sets is common.
As long as it takes. Those that need less time search the area, identify stuff, etc. The higher level you are the more likely you need half hour max for focus points.
This can vary pretty wildly by the group makeup as well. In my current game we don't have any true healers(A bard is able to give a little and battle medicine can help each character once a day) so we tend to have a longer period between fights of him patching people up. But with a group that keeps up the healing better during the fights or has a few people with focus abilities that can heal, just one or two ten minute sets is common.
Agreed! Party makeup can have a big impact. In our high level game, I play a champion with lay on hands and the ability to get all my focus points back in 10 minutes, so that goes a LONG way towards allowing us to top off without having to spend 20 minutes or more on healing.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I am a bit surprised to find there seems to be a consensus of "always at least one rest/refocus per encounter, sometimes more" since the way I had been playing it was that in a larger dungeon/complex environment you're not guaranteed to have a safe place to rest for 10 minutes unless you retreat to a room you can close up, and Eben then, resting for more than 10 minutes usually means a wandering monster check (depending on how badly they need the rest--I'm not the wandering monster).
I've not played all that many APs but I've noticed there's sometimes a room designated as a "safe to rest" room, so they party can always retreat back to there once they find it, as long as they're not worried of something happening in the dungeon while they're gone. Usually there's nothing, but I'd caution resting in a situation where the baddies might just leave with the thing you came to get. If I want to give the players a sense of urgency, I'll have their rest be "interrupted" by some threatening but not necessarily dangerous event right at the end and tell them they were able to finish up just as they heard the voices pass in the hall, or the door opens and a nonhostile NPC discovers their hiding spot.
Amd of course, the encounters are tailored to how rested I expect you to be--which since my longest running 2e game was a conversion of Carrion Crown, I generally had control over. Perhaps by the end of the year we'll see if I don't need to adjust my assumptions for a real 2e AP such as Seasob of Ghosts albeit knowing that one is slightly lower combat threat than the average for the system.
On the other hand, it's not that I necessarily keep a tight fist on the rest throttle. Very often my party is eager to push for a couple encounters in a row unless they happen to be the one who took a bunch of damage in the last fight... but then none of my player's have yet made a character that is highly dependent on their focus point. A few have had focus powers that are nice to have (Champion, Monk) but nothing they'd blow on a trivial encounter if they didn't know they were resting after
| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
I am a bit surprised to find there seems to be a consensus of "always at least one rest/refocus per encounter, sometimes more"
The game just frankly plays worse if you don't, especially depending on the class makeup of a group.
Like playing an Alchemist or Psychic in a game without consistent refocus breaks is just an extremely annoying experience.
In running my PF2-converted Ironfang Invasion campaign, the party usually had to travel between encounters, so they had plenty of time to rest. Sometimes they had to camp for the night.
They had some situations with multiple encounters in the same location. For example, they had to clear out the monsters in the Dwarven Reliquary beneath Kraggodan in Siege of Stone. I had to increase the number of monsters because the party had 7 members and had recruited allies from Kraggodan, but even after the increase it was Low Threat (tactical spoilery chronicle here). So they moved to the next room and ran into the spoilery final boss, who tried to trick them and then retreated when she failed. Technically she was a 69-xp Moderate Threat when alone. They retreated too, because they realized that they needed to prepare a different set of spells against her. Does taking a day off to change spells count as a rest?
My tactical spoilery chronicle lists the Threat level of the challenges. After they returned to the reliquary, I set up a 63-xp Low-Threat encounter, a 30-xp hazard, a 51-xp Low-Threat encounter, a 69-xp Low-Threat encounter, and then they rested up in a protected room where they planned a trap for the final boss. The trap worked, so I had to rewrite my plans and invent another string of Low-Threat and Moderate-Threat encounters. They did not rest during that string.
My players know that during a rest, an enemy patrol might spot them. And such patrols will alert other enemies nearby. The PCs have a defensive combat style and barely get damaged much during Low and Moderate Threat encounters. My rough reckoning is that they would rest after three Moderate-Threat encounters, but if given a safe resting location, they will rest earlier.
The Severe-Threat encounters are typically a boss. They have to defeat the boss's defenders to reach the boss, so they have no more encounters remaining after the boss. They have plenty of time to rest and search for treasure.
In my current Strength of Thousands campaign, they almost never had more than one combat encounter per day. The big exception was clearing out Trivial- and Low-Threat gremlins and giant insects from the Infested Caverns during Kindled Magic. And they decided to capture the gremlins alive, so they repeatedly retreated from the caverns to haul their prisoners out. They did that so often that a spell with one-hour duration expired. An NPC ally was a 4th-level phoenix-blooded sorcerer with Rejuvenating Flames focus spell and those prisoner delays let his focus pool refocus to keep them healed.
|
| 6 people marked this as a favorite. |
I am a bit surprised to find there seems to be a consensus of "always at least one rest/refocus per encounter, sometimes more" since the way I had been playing it was that in a larger dungeon/complex environment you're not guaranteed to have a safe place to rest for 10 minutes unless you retreat to a room you can close up, and Eben then, resting for more than 10 minutes usually means a wandering monster check (depending on how badly they need the rest--I'm not the wandering monster).
As a counterpoint to that, a lot of dungeon complexes are kinda unrealistic to begin with;
- Many of them only show important rooms where an encounter takes place. Very few broom closets and toilets.
- Reasonably, the monsters in the next room should hear the fight and get involved/flee. But that would completely blow the intended difficulty out of the park.
The background reason is writing economics. It costs money to make a much bigger map with much more spread out rooms, and word count to describe all these rooms where not much is happening.
So there's a sort of compromise: the map will leave out a lot, but that doesn't mean you should mash all the encounters together. A huge map with only 5% of the rooms actually being interesting isn't actually more fun for the players either, so this is a good compromise for everyone.
I've not played all that many APs but I've noticed there's sometimes a room designated as a "safe to rest" room, so they party can always retreat back to there once they find it, as long as they're not worried of something happening in the dungeon while they're gone. Usually there's nothing, but I'd caution resting in a situation where the baddies might just leave with the thing you came to get. If I want to give the players a sense of urgency, I'll have their rest be "interrupted" by some threatening but not necessarily dangerous event right at the end and tell them they were able to finish up just as they heard the voices pass in the hall, or the door opens and a nonhostile NPC discovers their hiding spot.
A lot of APs sound pretty urgent, you know, the BBEG could be doing their bad thing any moment now. It's more fun to play as if it is, too. But if you tried to do all the encounters in the dungeon without breaks, it'd be impossibly hard. And if you actually look in the AP itself, it all sounds urgent but there's often no actual deadline. Whenever the PCs get there will conveniently be just on time.
Again, this is a compromise to make the game playable, and it works better if you don't look too strictly at whether that's realistic.
Amd of course, the encounters are tailored to how rested I expect you to be--which since my longest running 2e game was a conversion of Carrion Crown, I generally had control over. Perhaps by the end of the year we'll see if I don't need to adjust my assumptions for a real 2e AP such as Seasob of Ghosts albeit knowing that one is slightly lower combat threat than the average for the system.
Yeah, but it's different between PF1 and PF2. PF1 worked more with the idea that you'd do a bunch of encounters in a day and spend resources on each, so the later ones would be harder. PF2 is a lot more oriented to starting each encounter at mostly full (HP, focus points). Most encounters you'll find in PF2 encounters assume the party is at full.
This has benefits and drawbacks. Benefits are that you can have exciting encounters even if you have only 1 or as many as 10 in a day and it's not very different to prepare. I like that a lot for weekday evening gaming groups that don't do a lot of encounters per session, but the encounters are still challenging. To do PF1 balance exactly the official way you were pretty much trying to get close to 4 encounters every day.
On the other hand there are drawbacks, such as that it's harder to use time pressure in a story without messing up encounter difficulty. They can be overcome however.
When playing Agents of Edgewatch and we were raiding a gang compound, it wouldn't make a lot of sense to take a 10m break to heal up in the middle. After all, at some point the compound goes on high alert, the boss starts burning evidence and so forth. So we player that one as back to back encounters. But since we were the police, we also got a lot of extra healing potions from an alchemist at HQ so we could recover faster (and of course the potions would expire next day if not used).
- Many of them only show important rooms where an encounter takes place. Very few broom closets and toilets.
You make a variety of excellent points, some of which I usually factor into my decision on rest-pacing, but I'm amused to note that I feel like most complexes I've played in havd had af least one of these--at least when they are intended to be firmer or currect dwellings. It actually became a running joke among my players, "thank God we found the toilet."
It's true though, a lot of adventure dungeons rely on the idea that the NPCs in one room assume their allies in the next room can handle whatever that noise is or otherwise don't care to find out. Sometimes this is subverted by having a few more enemies joint at enough of a delay, but it is still a thing.
I don't remember now if I wrote this into the adventure or it came as published, but one of my favourite encounters in Carrion Crown was in Book 4
Of course as you say, the game often works better if you bake in allowances for the party to back off when a fight goes bad. This is where I have employed the idea of using an "interruption" at the end of resting. My players entered the chemical works in Book 2 through the second floor storage room, which has no encounters in it. After a moment of scouting they decided to rest up from the fight with the yard guardian. The building being a factory, no one inside was aware of the fight outside, so it wasn't until after 10 minutes had passed that I had one of the workers come to the storage room for supplies, whereupon the party were able to kidnap, question, and offer cookies to the worker in exchange for information about what was going on and how to find their bosses, before hiding the worker in a crate with an extra cookie for later.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Its probably better to set the tone/tempo of the area at at the start and at any point the tone/tempo changes.
So the party enters an enemy camp of hobgoblins, its probably obvious there will be no 10 minute rests as long as they are there but in describing the camp you can make that point clear.
If the camp is especially sprawling with patrols to keep the different areas informed, then the players taking out a patrol might give them 10 minutes of rest before other parts of the camp would become aware of the missing patrol.
Using this kind of structure gives opportunities for rest even in a situation with a dangerous tone and battle after battle tempo.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Its probably better to set the tone/tempo of the area at at the start and at any point the tone/tempo changes.
So the party enters an enemy camp of hobgoblins, its probably obvious there will be no 10 minute rests as long as they are there but in describing the camp you can make that point clear.
If the camp is especially sprawling with patrols to keep the different areas informed, then the players taking out a patrol might give them 10 minutes of rest before other parts of the camp would become aware of the missing patrol.
Using this kind of structure gives opportunities for rest even in a situation with a dangerous tone and battle after battle tempo.
Yeah, I'd just been thinking about how most early D&D modules had reasons for neighbors to react or not depending on both the narrative and combat balance. So you might have all all-hands-on-deck brawl at the entrance vs. waves of minor troops while the leader might fortify up for a second battle while in the creepy bits those guys don't venture to each room might be potentially lethal.
Many of the campaign-arc enemy powers were chaotic, with infighting, apathy, etc.. Then one might get to the Fire Giants, Lawful & militaristic AND with depths of troops and resources their chaotic counterparts had lacked so now you're in a state of perpetual war w/ raids, traps, and ambushes!Which is to say, stealth and strategy (even diplomacy) mattered as much as tactics and firepower. And I appreciate APs that address all of those.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I think an excellent example of a complex PF2 dungeon that defies "rest 10 minutes after every encounter" can be found in the mine in book 2 of Age of Ashes.
I'd be interested to hear of any GMs who ran that and where and how you let your party rest (in spoilers if you are going to give specifics). Our group had to attack and retreat at least twice before clearing that dungeon, once with a PC getting captured because we couldn't bring them with us when we ran. It was a lot of fun, but it was one of the more challenging dungeons I have played in PF2.
I think an excellent example of a complex PF2 dungeon that defies "rest 10 minutes after every encounter" can be found in the mine in book 2 of Age of Ashes.
I'd be interested to hear of any GMs who ran that and where and how you let your party rest (in spoilers if you are going to give specifics). Our group had to attack and retreat at least twice before clearing that dungeon, once with a PC getting captured because we couldn't bring them with us when we ran. It was a lot of fun, but it was one of the more challenging dungeons I have played in PF2.
Anyone opting to talk about the mines please spoiler your posts.
Our party is about to go into them next weekend.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
If you had to guess, in general, how many 10 minute rests do you typically take:
1. Between moderate encounters?
2. After an extreme encounter?
3. Over the course of a whole level?
This is a hard question to answer as the circumstances dictate how often we rest, not the difficulty of the encounter.
If we're doing something like hex crawl, then we get plenty of time between encounters to come in full.
If we're doing encounters that are completely separate from each other, then we usually get plenty of time to take a 10 minute or three 10 minutes depending on how hammered we are. We'll heal up and refocus.
But if we're striking a location like a dungeon level, an enemy base, or dragon's lair or some place where rest will be minimal, we go in with the expectation to be tight with the resources and we try to operate efficiently as we deal non-stop with encounters until the area is cleared.
There are times where we don't even use up the 10 minute heroism duration before clearing an entire area of 8 to 12 or more connected encounters. When we do this, we go in prepared to very efficiently eliminate the weak encounters with minimal resource expenditure and save for the harder encounters while also taking advantage of the AoE opportunities.
Hex crawl circumstances as many 10 minute rests as we feel like doing.
Separated dungeon encounters where monsters don't really come into other rooms or areas, as many as we can manage or feel like.
Boss monster lairs or connected areas, maybe if I'm DMing I try to set up for the party to have at least one if I feel like the final encounter will be too rough or they need it or I want them to have access to their 10 minute use resources for fun.
Recently, we took two boss monster encounter locations in an AP with no rest at all. One was a cave complex and the other was a fort. Cave had about 8 encounters with two being CR+3 or CR+4. The fort had about 8 or 10 moderates with one CR+2 boss.
Circumstances dictate rest in our games. Encounter difficulty is a secondary concern that as a DM I mainly look at if if the monsters have particularly hard to deal with or dangerous attacks or defenses like massive AOE attacks that will hammer the entire party hit point pool or a super high AC or damage resistance the party can't penetrate easily.
Rest priority:
1. Circumstances
2. Particular abilities of creature and the ability of the party to counter or attack them.
3. Encounter difficulty
3 tied: Terrain difficulty or hazards or some similar encounter difficulty alteration.
That is how I tend to look at when to provide 10 minute rests.
I think an excellent example of a complex PF2 dungeon that defies "rest 10 minutes after every encounter" can be found in the mine in book 2 of Age of Ashes.
I'd be interested to hear of any GMs who ran that and where and how you let your party rest (in spoilers if you are going to give specifics). Our group had to attack and retreat at least twice before clearing that dungeon, once with a PC getting captured because we couldn't bring them with us when we ran. It was a lot of fun, but it was one of the more challenging dungeons I have played in PF2.
This is module 4? Without getting into specifics, that was a hard place, one specific encounter being particularly hard. We almost ended up dead. We had to pull back after that particular encounter. I'm sure you know which one it is. The other encounters in the area pretty straightforward and pretty easy, but that one encounter and connected encounters turned into an extremely painful battle. That was the one encounter that required we pull back for rest. Since this was the first 2nd edition AP we played, it woke us up that PF2 is harder than PF1 even at higher level. That was painful. Fun, but painful.
That was the only encounter that required a full days rest as we drained the pool of resources after reaching that encounter point since it is after another big group encounter. Just that one area required rest. The rest we took out fairly easy.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
This is a hard question to answer as the circumstances dictate how often we rest, not the difficulty of the encounter.
An encounter in my Fistful of Flowers campaign had circumstances dictate a total lack of rests.
I had written the mission based on the movie The Seven Samurai. A villager had overheard the scouts for a bandit camp planning to raid a halfling farming village after the village got the harvest in. The mayor and sheriff had gone to the city to recruit help, but the only six 5th-level leshies that they met on the road were willing to help. The plot of The Seven Samurai is that the heroes had to fortify the village and teach the villagers how to defend themselves. I made 22 2nd-level mounted bandits, a 220-xp Beyond-Extreme Threat challenge, to encourage the party to not take on the bandits without the aid of the villagers.
They took on the bandits without the aid of the villagers, except that the 2nd-level sheriff and deputy were accompanying them to find the bandit's hideout. The bandits had taken over another village, forcing the men to work in the fields and the women to work in the houses while their children or other relatives were held hostage. The party decided to attack at night because a lucky weather check gave a full moon for their low-light vision while the bandits were human and would have impaired vision in the dim light. And the PCs waited until most bandits were asleep in their stolen houses. Five mounted bandits patrolled the village a night. The party took two patrolling bandits out quickly, the third almost rang the church bell to alert his fellows but died at the church door, and the last two went riding from house to house waking up their fellow bandits.
Thus, the party was under intense time pressure. They were faced with waves of bandits and needed to take down each wave before the next wave reinforced it. Some PCs also went to the corrals and chased off the horses to that the awakened bandits would not be mounted.
The party won because they advanced nonstop and never gave the bandits time to organize. Three mounted bandits matched one party member in combat strength. Whenever the bandits managed that 3 to 1 concentration against the leshy barbarian, who liked to advance faster than the rest, the leshy spellcasters thinned them down from a distance.
This battle could be viewed as a 30-xp Trivial-Threat encounter against the 1st three patrolling bandits, followed by a 30-xp Trivial-Threat Encounter of entering houses of sleeping bandits, immediately followed by a 80-xp Moderate-Threat encounter of the 1st wave of awakened bandits, and finally the 80-xp Moderate-Threat encounter of the 2nd wave. A rest break would have let the two waves combine into a 160-xp Extreme Threat.
This is a hard question to answer as the circumstances dictate how often we rest, not the difficulty of the encounter.An encounter in my Fistful of Flowers campaign had circumstances dictate a total lack of rests.
I had written the mission based on the movie The Seven Samurai. A villager had overheard the scouts for a bandit camp planning to raid a halfling farming village after the village got the harvest in. The mayor and sheriff had gone to the city to recruit help, but the only six 5th-level leshies that they met on the road were willing to help. The plot of The Seven Samurai is that the heroes had to fortify the village and teach the villagers how to defend themselves. I made 22 2nd-level mounted bandits, a 220-xp Beyond-Extreme Threat challenge, to encourage the party to not take on the bandits without the aid of the villagers.
They took on the bandits without the aid of the villagers, except that the 2nd-level sheriff and deputy were accompanying them to find the bandit's hideout. The bandits had taken over another village, forcing the men to work in the fields and the women to work in the houses while their children or other relatives were held hostage. The party decided to attack at night because a lucky weather check gave a full moon for their low-light vision while the bandits were human and would have impaired vision in the dim light. And the PCs waited until most bandits were asleep in their stolen houses. Five mounted bandits patrolled the village a night. The party took two patrolling bandits out quickly, the third almost rang the church bell to alert his fellows but died at the church door, and the last two went riding from house to house waking up their fellow bandits.
Thus, the party was under intense time pressure. They were faced with waves of bandits and needed to take down each wave before the next wave reinforced it. Some PCs also went to...
I love The Seven Samurai. That must have been fun to run and play. That is one my all time favorite movies. That is a hard adventure idea to pull off. Hopefully it went well. Though I imagine you didn't have the sacrifice of the movie in the adventure as folks get attached to their characters. Or did you work in heroic sacrifice into the encounter? That is always tough to do.
|
|
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
So a point I definitely agree with is that it's fun to vary how much rest is available. Sometimes you have oodles, you know this is probably the only encounter that day (or week!) and you totally cut loose with spells. And sometimes it's just one thing after another, can't get a moment's rest because then the enemy will get their stuff together.
So that's the one hand where you use timing (and variation) to create excitement.
On the other hand, game balance will only go so far, if you're going to do heaps of encounters in a row, you probably need some extra consumables, or they need to be kinda easy encounters, or some other way to offset.
"Realism" is not something I worry about too much. It can be nice if you have a really well-built dungeon where you can be sensible about which encounters flow into each other, where wandering patrols can interrupt your rest. But there's also a fair amount of "we'll just fit everything onto this single standard size flipmat" adventures.
My main takeaway from that is that realism is a perk, but doesn't trump an enjoyable, balanced enough to be playable, game.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Consumables really help parties be ready to handle variation in encounter pacing. I do think some heavily focus point reliant classes struggle can struggle a bit when encounters collapse on each other, but the vast majority of focus point reliant classes have the ability to cast spells from scrolls anyway, so it is only really the monk and champion who can potentially be in a bind, although there are tons of consumables that both classes can use too.
I love The Seven Samurai. That must have been fun to run and play. That is one my all time favorite movies. That is a hard adventure idea to pull off. Hopefully it went well. Though I imagine you didn't have the sacrifice of the movie in the adventure as folks get attached to their characters. Or did you work in heroic sacrifice into the encounter? That is always tough to do.
Yes, The Seven Samurai is a great movie and has been mimicked often, such as with The Magnificent Seven and Battle Beyond the Stars.
I did not pull off mimicking the movie. I had set up the potential to mimic the movie, with seven villagers serving key roles that might call for heroic sacrifice. For example, the sheriff resembled the experienced samurai Gorōbei and the deputy resembled the swordmaster samurai Kyūzō. Nevertheless, GMs have to let the players decide on their own plans. My players realized that they would have more control over the battle if they attacked the bandits rather than waiting for the bandits to attack the village, so they derailed the movie plot. And with that control they avoided heroic sacrifice. They are very good at protecting fellow party members and also protected the two halflings with them. The price of their strategy is that they had to pull off their surprise attack almost perfectly with no rest or retreat; otherwise, the bandits could overwhelm them by sheer numbers. They didn't know the bandits--who were former military from Galt--had planned to ring the church bell in case of a night attack, but they correctly interpreted that one bandit's actions and stopped him. (The church was easily recognizable because I used an Old West town for the map.)
And back to the topic of this thread, the players chose to rest based on balancing the risk of being low in hit points and focus points versus the risk of giving the enemy time to take control of the situation themselves. My players try to learn which enemies are intelligent and experienced and should not be given time to respond. They hit the stronghold of such enemies at a nonstop run. Other enemies have no coordination and the party can clear one room in a dungeon with little risk of enemies two rooms away getting a clue. Taking the time to heal up is the safest choice there.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Have we got a healer? Because that varies the number massively. In some games we have someone really focused on Medicine and can recover pretty quickly, in which case its usually 1 rest after an encounter, or maybe 2 after a severe encounter to fully recover. In Night of the Grey Death, I played a healing Cleric with fully decked out Medicine & Positive Luminance from the Sun Domain and I could recover the party from an encounter ABSURDLY quickly.
In another group I was in we had a couple of people with Champion Dedication/Lay on Hands and that was it. It took us an hour to fully heal after a fight one time, and it was routinely 30+ minutes. That party was super fun, but no one had any real skill in Medicine (trained does not get it done at level 12).
Well you can throw low after low after low encounters followed by something resource intensive without rest.
You can do similar with several moderate encounter with only 10 min in between finishing with a severe
You can mix it up with multiple low and moderate making sure your giving 10 min rest before a consecutive moderate and up to 30 minutes before hitting them with a severe.
But know your party is the first and last in all of this. How tactically they play, how well they use resources, and party composition to take advantage of those rests matters in what they can handle. Basically what Tridus said in terms of being able to take advantage of rest time.
So really how many rests you give to players depends on the challenge of the fights you have planned for your party tempered by the story you plan to tell.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Have we got a healer? Because that varies the number massively. In some games we have someone really focused on Medicine and can recover pretty quickly, in which case its usually 1 rest after an encounter, or maybe 2 after a severe encounter to fully recover. In Night of the Grey Death, I played a healing Cleric with fully decked out Medicine & Positive Luminance from the Sun Domain and I could recover the party from an encounter ABSURDLY quickly.
In another group I was in we had a couple of people with Champion Dedication/Lay on Hands and that was it. It took us an hour to fully heal after a fight one time, and it was routinely 30+ minutes. That party was super fun, but no one had any real skill in Medicine (trained does not get it done at level 12).
The style in which we play is not possible without combat healing because the lack of rest can stretch hit points a lot, especially if fighting creatures with strong AoE attacks. So to play a no or little rest style where you hit an entire area in one continuous, no rest strike requires combat healing unless you get extraordinarily lucky. Healing resources must be be managed.
I am a bit surprised to find there seems to be a consensus of "always at least one rest/refocus per encounter, sometimes more" since the way I had been playing it was that in a larger dungeon/complex environment you're not guaranteed to have a safe place to rest for 10 minutes unless you retreat to a room you can close up, and Eben then, resting for more than 10 minutes usually means a wandering monster check (depending on how badly they need the rest--I'm not the wandering monster).
I've not played all that many APs but I've noticed there's sometimes a room designated as a "safe to rest" room, so they party can always retreat back to there once they find it, as long as they're not worried of something happening in the dungeon while they're gone. Usually there's nothing, but I'd caution resting in a situation where the baddies might just leave with the thing you came to get. If I want to give the players a sense of urgency, I'll have their rest be "interrupted" by some threatening but not necessarily dangerous event right at the end and tell them they were able to finish up just as they heard the voices pass in the hall, or the door opens and a nonhostile NPC discovers their hiding spot.
Amd of course, the encounters are tailored to how rested I expect you to be--which since my longest running 2e game was a conversion of Carrion Crown, I generally had control over. Perhaps by the end of the year we'll see if I don't need to adjust my assumptions for a real 2e AP such as Seasob of Ghosts albeit knowing that one is slightly lower combat threat than the average for the system.
On the other hand, it's not that I necessarily keep a tight fist on the rest throttle. Very often my party is eager to push for a couple encounters in a row unless they happen to be the one who took a bunch of damage in the last fight... but then none of my player's have yet made a character that is highly dependent on their focus point. A few have had focus powers that are nice to have (Champion, Monk) but nothing they'd...
The dungeon thing is something I struggle to make narrative sense of, despite knowing that the party needs to have rests in between encounters it really doesn't make sense in a "dungeon" (any place where multiple encounters exist that are physically separated such that they won't immediately be pulled in, but not so far that not having them be involved within 10 minutes would strain my believability in the setting).
Let's take a "typical" dungeon type scenario. How big is one floor of a dungeon? 100 ft by 100 ft? For creatures that are familiar with the location, it doesn't take long to walk through. And I personally find it hard to believe that even if there's only 1 group of enemies on that floor, that you don't have some other enemy that's going to be checking on that floor for some reason. Especially if you have guards set up to routinely inspect the building. Even more sore if you have an enemy casters that could cast alarm.
|
|
| 6 people marked this as a favorite. |
I think some dungeons are more "raid" and others are more "excavation".
That devil that's been contracted to guard that one room? He's not coming out. Nor is the golem. The ooze has a hunting ground that it wanders around in, but it doesn't systematically go checking up on other monsters in the other room to see if they want a cup of coffee. And maybe the undead horror is stuck in a room that's inaccessible until you dig it out.
On the other hand, the gang headquarters has posted guards, alarms, wandering patrols, and people coming to lay a bet with their mates about the upcoming dogfight in their favorite dive bar.
Now it becomes easier to reason about why a rest in one dungeon is more plausible than in the other.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I think it's definitely true that a lot of environmental setups make 10 minute breaks (much less 20 or 30 minute ones) kind of strain credulity.
But in that case I think the better answer is to simply not make it take 10 minutes if that interval feels bad.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Generally as many as what is required to get the PCs back up to full is not full hit points and focus points. If you don't fights because far to easy on the enemy side to commit to a TPK. The gam expects near full resources outside of Spell Slots which I don't know how balance is suppose to take in to account for a Spell Caster at max slots or one at half slots.
I'm reminded of an AP in Starfinder where one foldout map served for all the encounters on a planet. I thought that was cool that the map had enough variety it could serve as many different battle sites across the world. Except the weren't scattered. Every important event or site we needed to investigate limited themselves to a space about the size of a suburban court, with every apex mega-predator sticking to their own house, and the sniper perched on house C completely ignoring you until you stepped on his lawn (despite him being there to hunt you and able to target you anywhere on the map).
Please, Paizo, never do that again!
Anyway, had we known of the looming monstrosities (which, being outside w/ scant foliage we should've seen) we never would've rested between battles. At least not "in game". As a table we recognized the meta-conceit that we could and should rest right out in the open. *roll eyes* I very much appreciate when authors provide "in game" reasoning for proper distribution of encounters! And if we accidentally trigger more or stealthily trigger fewer, that's on our shoulders.
ETA: I think the potential to trigger more allows for one of the most valuable applications of Stealth & subterfuge. I find that quite rewarding beyond the mere scouting and hiding aspects.
The dungeon thing is something I struggle to make narrative sense of, despite knowing that the party needs to have rests in between encounters it really doesn't make sense in a "dungeon" (any place where multiple encounters exist that are physically separated such that they won't immediately be pulled in, but not so far that not having them be involved within 10 minutes would strain my believability in the setting).
Inventing plausible rest opportunities is part of good Pathfinder dungeon design. As Ascalaphus pointed out, most dungeons are not realistic. Instead, they merely have to be understandable so that the players can recognize the clues that a particular room or situation is a safe place to rest.
For example, in Fortress of the Stone Giants at least one stone giant opposed the war and was willing to hide the party for an overnight rest.
Let's take a "typical" dungeon type scenario. How big is one floor of a dungeon? 100 ft by 100 ft?
100 feet by 100 feet (20 squares by 20 squares) is small for a dungeon floor. A dungeon that small would not require a rest unless it was jam packed with troops.
The Infested Caverns that I mentioned in an earlier comment is 40 squares by 50 squares, which is 200 feet by 250 feet, five times the area except that half that area is stone between caverns.
Prisoners of the Blight in the Ironfang Invasion adventure path has a reasonably-sized dungeon that is the home of Queen Arlantia. It is split across 3 maps representing 3 floors. The Upper Reaches map measures 175 feet by 100 feet and has rooms G1 through G12. The Deeper Reaches measures 175 feet by 90 feet and has rooms H1 through H5. The final map Arhlantu is one big oval room measuring 300 feet by 150 feet. My players rested once for 10 minutes in room G8, after the 7-member 16th-level party fought a 19th-level Primal Bandersnatch. The gargantuan dead bandersnatch blocked the single entrance to that side cavern, so the party figured they were isolated enough for some healing time. The bandersnatch was from a later room but the party retreated to G8 to make it off-guard due to squeezing.
They also took time in room H5 after clearing the Deeper Reaches to free some prisoners from blight-based mind control, which required about half an hour. They probably healed up during that period, too.
They would have next pushed on to battle Queen Arlantia in Arhlantu, but I had boosted her to 20th level and given her high-level minions, so I wanted the party (who had just earned 17th level) to be at full resources including restoring their spells. I added an extradimensional trap between the Lower Reaches and Arhlantu and they spent the night in the trap before they managed to escape. Arlantia knew the PCs were coming, so she had primed the trap and then stopped worrying about them because she was confident that the trap was inescapable.
And of course, the party healed up during a long break after defeating Queen Arlantia and her minions.
Generally as many as what is required to get the PCs back up to full is not full hit points and focus points. If you don't fights because far to easy on the enemy side to commit to a TPK. The gam expects near full resources outside of Spell Slots which I don't know how balance is suppose to take in to account for a Spell Caster at max slots or one at half slots.
My party typically conserves some top-rank spells for the final boss battle, but the dungeon in Prisoners of the Blight had left them too few spells for both Queen Arlantia and her minions. And they needed time to prepare their new levels of spells, so I added the overnight trap as a plot twist to force them to rest of the night. I read that the PF2 designers expect a spellcaster to cast one top-rank spell in a Moderate-Threat encounter, so they think a typical workday should have 3 or 4 Moderate-Threat encounters. A spellcaster who exhausted their top-rank spell slots would be at about half power, so adjust the encounter budget as if the party were missing half a character.
|
|
I read that the PF2 designers expect a spellcaster to cast one top-rank spell in a Moderate-Threat encounter, so they think a typical workday should have 3 or 4 Moderate-Threat encounters. A spellcaster who exhausted their top-rank spell slots would be at about half power, so adjust the encounter budget as if the party were missing half a character.
I think spending one top shelf spell per significant encounter is a decent expectation. From a "fun" standpoint, you didn't play a caster to not use your spells because you're living in fear you might need them even more in the next fifteen encounters.
It's also a trend I've seen in PFS multitable specials: adventures that narratively take place over multiple days, or have other contrivances that allow for a full rest. As a result, casters can bust out the big stuff in encounters a lot more often. Which means enemies crumple sooner, don't get to do as much damage and so forth.
Since those adventures tend to have noticeable out of character time pressure: you're playing this with 5-100 tables of players simultaneously, and it's not good if some tables have to do combat the slow careful way to conserve every resource.
I think another good consideration is, how many encounters should a dungeon really have? What serves the goal of a good story with a good tension curve? I think often, three to four significant encounters plus some palate cleanser easy ones & hazards, is just fine.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Generally as many as what is required to get the PCs back up to full is not full hit points and focus points. If you don't fights because far to easy on the enemy side to commit to a TPK. The gam expects near full resources outside of Spell Slots which I don't know how balance is suppose to take in to account for a Spell Caster at max slots or one at half slots.
I would like to dispel the idea that the game expects rest before every encounter. I don't think it does.
Rest is just another gauge to make consecutive fights easier or harder for the players, it also helps set the sense of danger of an area if the party doesnt feel safe enough to rest.For example you can think of consecutive moderate encounters as more difficult when there is no reasonable opportunity to rest in between them.