Pathfinder 2e

[Pedantic]

"Medicine in D&D Land is explicitly a reusable magic ritual that isn't subject to mortal limits of how much you can heal how quickly" would be convenient for gameplay and allow for parties without a cleric or "person able to use CLW dildos". Doubt they're intentionally going that far though.

That will produce 4e tears if you actually spell it out instead of just handwaving it, and PF weirdly seems to be trying to court some of those people, though.

[GâtFromKI]

So they created resonance to limit the use of CLW wands because BADWRONGFUN. In the last update, they added a new use of medicine to heal each character to full HP for free between each combat.

Wait; what?

I'm not trying to disagree with the overall thrust of your argument. But I think that this is not the best example. A lot of people find glo-sticking yourself to full with CLW wands after each battle to be kind of silly. Saying that the Medicine skill lets you heal up to full is (I think) a better thematic fit.

Also, it can be viewed as a bit of ivory tower game design: Whether or not inter-battle HP depletion is meant to be a thing has a huge impact on how a game's systems should work, and it's probably not something that should be hidden from the player. Having a PC skill be responsible for inter-battle healing is more transparent than having it come from wands. It's also more compatible with MCs who want to run low-magic campaigns.

I think my example is good.

The role of the designer is to answer the question: "are the PCs expected to heal their HP between each fight, or should the HP be limited and subject to attrition during the day?"; this question doesn't have One True Answer, and both decisions lead to different games.

But once the designer has made a decision about the answer... He shouldn't decide what is fun and what isn't. He should just design the game according to his decision.

The game has an history with the wand of CLW. If the designer decides HP should be limited during the day, then the wand is a bug and the designer has to make it inefficient in the new edition. I have no problem with that - if he designs the other parts of the game in accordance with his decision (eg if the HP are depleted before the other limited resources, then de facto those other limited resources aren't limited anymore: he has to change the balance) (more specifically in PF2, monsters shouldn't have 5-10% to remove 80% of the HPs of a fighter each round if the fighter is expected to enter fights with 80% HP).

If the designer decides PCs should be healed between fights, then the CLW wand isn't an issue. The role of the designer is to provide other options for people who think wands are silly: medicine skill, senzu beans from DragonBall (or "super-healing-lambas"), etc. His role isn't to decide BandageGirl is fun but DildoBoy isn't - obviously some people don't have any problem with the wand.

Removing the wand while creating another option for free out-of-combat heal is complete nonsense - it's just the designer running full circle not knowing how his game is supposed to be played. Especially when both options have different cost and could be balanced together: bandages cost time while wands cost money.

[rasmuswagner]

Even for Paizo, this is staggeringly incompetent. Daily healing expectations is a god damn load bearing concept.

[Blicero]

That is.... incredibly stupid. "I can't imagine magical fucking powers healing people to full. I can however imagine that bandages instantly heal broken bones and bloodloss."

Please read what I said. Omegonthesane did. I'm not saying that I can't imagine magical powers healing people. I'm saying that glo-sticking yourself to full after every battle is aesthetically stupid. Even if it's mechanically equivalent to the medicine, it hurts the thematic fiction of the gameworld.

[virgil]

You have people like him that aren't considered an aesthetically stupid trait of the setting. Why should a wand be substantially different when you've already accepted that singular magical abilities can be replicated with equipment?

[Kaelik]

That is.... incredibly stupid. "I can't imagine magical fucking powers healing people to full. I can however imagine that bandages instantly heal broken bones and bloodloss."

Please read what I said. Omegonthesane did. I'm not saying that I can't imagine magical powers healing people. I'm saying that glo-sticking yourself to full after every battle is aesthetically stupid. Even if it's mechanically equivalent to the medicine, it hurts the thematic fiction of the gameworld.

I understood and what I'm saying is that your claim that:

"It is thematic to wrap broken bones in a bandage and have them instantly heal but it is TERRIBLE BAD GARBAGE THEME to have someone use magic powers to heal broken bones, that doesn't make any sense."

is really fucking stupid.

[GâtFromKI]

That is.... incredibly stupid. "I can't imagine magical fucking powers healing people to full. I can however imagine that bandages instantly heal broken bones and bloodloss."

Please read what I said. Omegonthesane did. I'm not saying that I can't imagine magical powers healing people. I'm saying that glo-sticking yourself to full after every battle is aesthetically stupid. Even if it's mechanically equivalent to the medicine, it hurts the thematic fiction of the gameworld.

OK, I'll try another way to explain it: I don't care about your opinion.

The fact is, I won't prevent you from using bandages in your game. Why do you fell entitled to prevent me from using wands in my game?

There isn't any sensible reason not to allow both. Bandages and wands. And roast turkey and fairy in a bottle. Then, if you think roast turkey are silly, you can remove it and allow bandages only: who cares about what happens in your game, except you and your friends? The fact they remove an existing option while they create a new option doing the the same proves they have no idea what they're doing.

[Omegonthesane]

I didn't make any fucking statement about the aesthetics of the mass healing ritual, for all I care it's queueing up to give an octopus a blowjob. The only point of contention I had for "uses wang" vs "uses magic ritual with bandages" is the implication that the latter requires a skill available to any class thus removing the requirement that someone play a dedicated healer.

[GâtFromKI]

What if no one wants to invest in medicine?

Treat wound become harder and harder if you don't increase the skill at every possible occasion (yes, the rules are stupid at that point). There are 16 skills (not counting lore) and each character can increase a grand total of 3 skills to the max.

What if medicine is not one of the 3 skill of choice of any player?

Once again, from a design standpoint, to have the choice between bandages and wands is in every way better than not not to have the choice.

[deaddmwalking]

I agree with the larger point:

Either healing to full between battles is possible and expected and the game is designed around that or full healing is not available and characters are expected to have hit points depleted in the course of a full day of adventuring.

Or the other alternative is that the adventuring day is one encounter - never more - because that's suicidal.

If the game is designed around the expectation that players heal up to full hit points between fights, it doesn't make sense to eliminate one of the options to do that and create a different option to do that. Once you accept that healing to full is expected behavior, you might as well fully support it.

In our heartbreaker we have two hit point totals. The first is action hero hit points. Getting shot leaves a cool wound but doesn't impair you. Healing that up between fights is easy - but keeping it up during a fight is an important mechanic. If you don't - or you take certain types of damage that are more serious - you probably won't be able to heal that between fights at low levels. At higher levels you can, but it involves enough resources that taking a short rest is appropriate. With the two, you're not likely to want to assault the castle without taking a break, but you might be able to do it without resting overnight.

[MGuy]

I wonder if people remember that they are making a game that they intend to be popular as well as functional. They may fail at both but the idea that a bunch of the gaming public don't like the aesthetic of clw wands being used as nauseam between fights seems uncontroversial to me. Yea the idea that switching from that to medic boxes is somehow going to make more sense might be stupid but it's absolutely the case that the gaming public have stupid tastes. Considering that this is a play test (one they might even be serious about), I assume they are testing out different options to see what sticks. I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt in that they are probably looking into seeing how the public responds to the change. Or at the very least Blicero was just pointing out that people complain about such a thing which would explain why they made a change that, as far as out of combat healing goes, doesn't matter much instead of assuming he thinks one option makes more sense than the other.

[maglag]

You have people like him that aren't considered an aesthetically stupid trait of the setting. Why should a wand be substantially different when you've already accepted that singular magical abilities can be replicated with equipment?

It's really funny you're using a Dragon Ball pic as the example to try to support your argument for equipment when Dragon Ball is all about your personal skillz being just superior to any piece of equipment and the main characters and villains are all fighting unarmed and unarmored.

And that's the point, it's bad when you can just replace class abilities with cheap widely available easily easy-to-carry equipment because then the game becomes all about minmaxing long lists of items instead of the characters themselves. Even Frank admited multiple times to having no idea how to balance utility equipment.

[virgil]

Mag, does the medicine skill use or need a first aid kit?

Alternate question - is PF2 or D&D supposed to be DBZ?

[Foxwarrior]

For some strange reason all the games with magical healing items that aren't D&D have potions of healing, and almost none of them have wands of healing.

How very mysterious.

[Koumei]

D&D is one of the only games I can think of where wands are limited use. In most other things they're either a focus (you have to use it to cast the spells you already have / it makes it easier to cast them) or they provide you with extra power (they are a ranged weapon / they grant you a spell you can use - without limit or using your own MP).

Potions/Sitrus Berries are a consumable for when you don't want to go back to town, sit down for a bit, walk it off (with the magical HP restoring amulet in areas without random battles), use a tent, savescum the "rest for 8 hours" option or whatever. Or cast Cure repeatedly and then drink an Ether. You buy 99 of the fuckers and then between fights you chug a ridiculous amount of them to get the party to "basically full HP".

I mean you could argue that the White Mage who uses a wand actually IS using a wand of healing when they cast Cure on the whole party, but the point is they're not burning charges out of their stick and throwing it away. Most games like to at least pretend that you don't have infinite healing to stay at full health between battles (even if you effectively do), and also don't make a wand simply 50 charges of X spell.

If you want to go down that path, that's certainly an option, but you're talking about completely reworking the way all wands work, and if you do that, it should be for a better reason than "It's weird if people use wands to heal".

[Username17]

For some strange reason all the games with magical healing items that aren't D&D have potions of healing, and almost none of them have wands of healing.

How very mysterious.

This isn't true. I mean, the obvious counter example is Shadowrun. While it has expendable and non-expendable magical foci, both are used by the caster, not the recipient. So there are wands of healing and there are scrolls of healing, but there are no potions of healing.

Regardless, as Koumei pointed out, in most games and stories, a wand isn't concepted as a stack of potions. Wands with charges is an extremely D&D specific thing and most other games do not do that. In most games and stories, a wand or staff is a focus that makes your spells bigger or is required to cast your bigger spells. In Final Fantasy, a White Mage's healing spells get bigger if she is holding a Seraph Cane.

-Username17

[Omegonthesane]

What if no one wants to invest in medicine?

Pressuring someone to take Medicine instead of Underwater Basketweaving is a far smaller dick move than pressuring someone to play Cleric instead of Barbarian.

Alternately "All adventurers start with Medicine, because the ones who didn't all died, it is suicide to enter a fight at less than full HP" (ETA: as in you get Medicine and then you get to choose skills)

Once again, from a design standpoint, to have the choice between bandages and wands is in every way better than not not to have the choice.

Not really objecting to wands here, but I feel if your game is balanced around people having access to a thing, you should hardcode people having access to that thing and not allow new players to accidentally not have that thing.

[maglag]

D&D is one of the only games I can think of where wands are limited use. In most other things they're either a focus (you have to use it to cast the spells you already have / it makes it easier to cast them) or they provide you with extra power (they are a ranged weapon / they grant you a spell you can use - without limit or using your own MP).

A lot of rogulelikes have wands with limited charges.

Also elder scroll games have staves of all levels with limited charges. Even magic weapons get limited charges there. Although you can recharge them with trapped souls.

The recent Zelda Breath of the Wild game has wands with limited charges too.

[Koumei]

The recent Zelda Breath of the Wild game has wands with limited charges too.

That game has regular unmagical swords with limited charges.

[maglag]

The recent Zelda Breath of the Wild game has wands with limited charges too.

That game has regular unmagical swords with limited charges.

Elder scrolls, Fallout and around half of MMOs have unmagical weapons with limited durability charges too. Even unmagical armor has charges there.

[Thaluikhain]

Also, the Exile series, dunno about the Avernum remakes though. E2 even had a spell or ability to let you recharge your wands.

Having said that, whilst more or less all fantasy RPGs borrow from D&D, Exile was very big on that.

Dragon Warriors let you make one wand, permanently sacrificing some of your magic points and giving you 1.5 of them stored in the wand you could use on a (very) limited set of spells associated with the type of wand you chose.

But those could just be exceptions that I'm personally familiar with, I can't speak of trends. It seems odd though that D&D hasn't made limited use wands more popular though. Is there a reason for that?

[Chamomile]

Why do we care whether you get your consumable healing from a wand of CLW or a giant stack of potions? Either way, you either accept that the party can heal to full infinitely between battles or you limit the amount of items available for purchase such that healing is limited.

[maglag]

Also, the Exile series, dunno about the Avernum remakes though. E2 even had a spell or ability to let you recharge your wands.

Having said that, whilst more or less all fantasy RPGs borrow from D&D, Exile was very big on that.

Dragon Warriors let you make one wand, permanently sacrificing some of your magic points and giving you 1.5 of them stored in the wand you could use on a (very) limited set of spells associated with the type of wand you chose.

But those could just be exceptions that I'm personally familiar with, I can't speak of trends. It seems odd though that D&D hasn't made limited use wands more popular though. Is there a reason for that?

Another example I completely forgot is Fire Emblem where in almost every game virtually everything has limited durability including plot items. And it's pretty far away from D&D as tactical RPGs go.

And funny thing is, for Fates they removed charges for weapons and magic tomes, but kept staves with limited uses, aka healing wands by any other name!

Fire Emblem clones do it a lot, and Yggdra Union in particular took things a step further with also removing between-mission healing so the whole game is you struggling to keep your units in one piece.

[OgreBattle]

For some strange reason all the games with magical healing items that aren't D&D have potions of healing, and almost none of them have wands of healing.

How very mysterious.

Liquid sloshing sound effects are fun

[Iduno]

Elder scrolls, Fallout and around half of MMOs have unmagical weapons with limited durability charges too. Even unmagical armor has charges there.

That's what I get for not liking new video games: I don't get to enjoy shitty durability mechanics. Fallout 1+2 didn't have durability, and I don't remember Daggerfall or Morrowind having it either (or it was a drawback you could choose in Daggerfall).

Games seem to repeatedly switch between "we want magical healing, because using a skill to instantly fix wounds doesn't make sense" and "we want a skill to heal wounds, because people don't like spending any money on healing items that wear out, and don't want to use found wands/potions because they're one-use and might be needed later." The other option is healing magic, but nobody wants to play the healbot.

Either everyone needs to heal to full "because magic" in the background between fights with no cost, or they need to design the game with the idea that you might be wounded going into fights, and expecting every fight to be able to wear you down to nothing is a bad idea.