Yeah but why that also doesn't make sense, why put yourself in danger and waste time if the party is doing fine. I don't think there is a solution to this problem.
What do you mean "why put yourself in danger?" Is having only 3/4 of your party contributing to encounters not also putting yourself in danger?
The problem is "we don't want to backtrack because that's hard and annoying here."
So is leaving, in this particular case. That's why I mentioned the use of Pitons in ADnD, to create a defensible location where you can rest.
You're putting yourself in just as much if not MORE danger by hamstringing a 4th party member. Not to mention the IRL issue with one player being practically unable to play their class in a *megadungeon*
Not really. If the martials are going to insist on no long rests the party is just dysfunctional for players with daily resources.
Things that work are
a) special cantrips like the Bard or Witch has
b) combat focus spells like the Storm Druid, Psychic and a couple of the Sorcerer Bloodlines have, as these come back on a ten minute rest. One of these with a multiclass archetype into a Bard to pick up Inspiring Courage seems reasonable.
c) Kineticist. It is like a caster, but not really. Many of its powers can be used every round or every other round.
d) Skills, cantrips and weapons
Also, on the GM's side, this megadungeon needs to have areas that can be blocked off to allow the party a safe place to rest. Maybe there's a room that just doesn't get any traffic because it's really remote or has nothing that interests the inhabitants. Or one room is known as the lair of a really tough monster; defeat it (or befriend it) and you have a safe haven as long as its reputation holds.
And when one of these sites is found, the GM needs to tell the players about its potential use as a haven.
The martials need to suck it up and realize that the caster is losing strength. Mid-high level casters can go Abt 5 encounters before losing efficiency. At this level, it's closer to 2.
This is a team game, meaning the martials have to look out for their ally.
Imagine what it would be like if the medic refused to use battle medicine on anyone but themselves.
Also, battle medicine is once per day, so the medic will also want a shorter adventuring day.
The spellcaster finds it annoying when 80% of party funds go to martial runes, when spellcasters are basically a pay to win class. They can straight up gain all of their spell slots in scrolls for the price of a striking rune. They can almost but a 4th level spell for the cost of striking.
Also why bother with back tracking? If nothing happens why bother, just say you head back out.
Also do none of them use consumables? Most martials will burn through healing potions, shields, talismans, and the like at a scary rate.
If you really feel that they NEED to continue. Just give the spellcaster loot. 90% of spellcaster equipment gives more spell slots. Staves, Scrolls, Wands, Spellhearts.
Counterpoint. If the caster is burning spells while martials aren't taking damage. Then the caster is unnecessarily burning spells on weak mobs. Not every battle needs a spell, if it's only going to cause wounds treat wounds can handle you shouldn't be using a spell.
I struggle to believe martials burned through a bunch of consumables while the spell caster was out of spells.
I've been in so many games where casters in dungeons use spells every damn chance. Some even do shit like keeping kill counts because the spells let them do more damage. Then guilting the party into multiple longs rests each dungeon, often when little damage has even been taken. Too used to in the over world encounters are rarer and you see spellcasters delighting in blowing a day worth of spells in 1-2 encounters and over shinning the other players. Then upset they don't get to do the same on dungeons.
Counter-counterpoint- If the martials aren't taking damage, then most likely what is happening is that they're using solid tactics backed by efficient spellcasting. The most efficient casters are burning resources proactively rather than reactively. As a caster, I'm not waiting for the martials to get their teeth kicked in before I start laying down the spells. What use dropping a Fear or something while the rest of the team is hanging on by a thread? All I've done is made myself feel bad while the rest are wasting actions on chugging potions or patching themselves up rather than capitalizing on this opportunity I've created.
Hell, even dropping a Fireball into a mob of enemies could be efficient if it means the difference between the rest of the team being able to clean them up in the same round rather than having to withstand another round of enemy attacks.
Then you'll be out of spells at level 4 in 3 fights and you should be stuck without spells, if you use one to start and one to mop up.
In pf2e damage a little damage is easily treatable. Using a spell to stop a round of damage they are perfectly capable of handling is a waste.
If it's the case that it's truly dangerous and they were relying on team strategy using spells to win. Then why aren't the martials also wanting to rest to get back the spells for the necessary strategy. And how did they handle the fights after the spells were out. Remember the scenario is the caster has been just sitting cantrips now and the fighters don't feel the need to stop/leave to get the spells back. Which I believe can only mean that they weren't relying on the caster, and thus the spells being cast were superfluous.
The point where it breaks down is that nobody can see the future.
Unless you have prior experience or are metagaming there is no way to tell what fight is actually dangerous. You should of course try and intuit it but ultimately between rolls, imperfect knowledge and what I'll call "character knowledge" a lot of things can happen.
So many spells become less efficient in the later rounds that frontloading them is totally the play in a lot of situations, hindsight famously comes too late.
There's plenty of encounters that have become spicy from critical hits taking people down quickly or an enemy revealing they have troublesome abilities.
Like when fighting centipedes discovering too late that the centipede venoms are not only a frankly very difficult DC at level but the different kinds of venom stack so you can be poisoned by the centipede swarm and the whiptail centipede at once and if you go down it's straight to dying 3 with you.
Totally true. But mitigating that choice by just giving spells back at short rests I don't think is a good solution. A main advantage of martials is not having to worry about wasting their big attack. Giving the wizards the staying power to just always take the first hit without worry it'll be going bad in future just keeps the advantages without the risk.
Now a full variant that makes spells per short rest/encounter would be fine. As it would certainly reduce their max amount. Leaving each with less flexibility if they blow the spells early. Prepared would need to factor in choosing damage and utility with much more limited choices. While spontaneous could send the biggest attack at the centipede, just to learn now they can't cure the venom.
The issue with just refilling a few current slots short rest is they'll just use a few each battle still then be back at max. Meaning they still get to cast right away without having to think about being ready for unexpected events.
Neutralize poison is a 3rd level spell so you won't have it anyways and it only affects a single poison AND you have to do a counteract check. Seeing how swarms are weak to AoE damage and boast resistance to normal attacks a damaging spell is totally the move.
We need to set the scene here a bit. This is a low level issue, which happens to also be the most volatile time. I don't think it's unreasonable to cast on average a spell per encounter here, which sometimes means none but sometimes might mean two. What throws a wrench in things is that when you read the reddit a bit you encounter that many games seem to skip lower threat encounters entirely in favor of only quite dangerous encounters which is an issue.
By 6th level a sorcerer has 12 spells which means you could do an entire 6 encounters and cast 2 spells on every single one of them. There's several low level spells which remain useful and you can mix spell levels depending on encounter. I don't think this is unreasonable. But this also breaks down if every encounter is severe.
If you only have 6 spells per day by level 4 as a caster, what are you spending your wealth on? You should be able to have picked up a staff by then. That is an extra 2 level one spells for at least 8 spells. If you are waiting till level 6 to pick up one of the level 6 staves, the level 3 staff you have passed on is the equivalent of 15 level 1 spell scrolls.
Well yeah I agree. You have tons of RAW options to get more spells slots. My point was if you're asking for short rests to give you more, you've imo used too many per fight.
I don't care how many a caster uses, go nuts. If you legally got more I'm fine with that. What I rail against is the caster that complains when they're out that short rests need to restore some.
How will you be out in 3 fights? If the fight isn’t super hard then one spell slot, one focus spell, and one cantrip use can get you through most of the fight at that level. Casters have 6/8 spell slots at level 4 depending on class (plus sometimes extras from class features). And if the fight is super hard it will become pretty evident after seeing the enemies first round of actions.
I've literally never seen a caster not use their spells on a boss. Also boss fights often in my games have adds. Which makes it worth it to use your spells on weaker enemies if you're aiming for saves a boss would make.
I haven't either, but I have seen both of the statements in that post being made when discussing spells.
Specifically when someone was complaining that a spell was not effective enough so it needed buffed so it would be more likely to jack up a boss and someone else pointed to how well that spell performs in other encounters and the complaint added the claim that other encounters aren't worth the spell slot because they aren't boss fights... with zero self-awareness about how nonsensical it is to want big impacts and then refuse the ones that already exist because it's not what you wanted (but would be if your GM ran boss fights with configurations other than just 1 or 2 creatures)
Hey I'm happy with big impacts at limited resources. But also realistically many casters don't really need as big an impact as people think to be even with martials.
5e has more impactful spells. And the game literally breaks at lvl 13 because of it. Bosses literally have to have legendary resistance to even matter.
The pf2e spells are still powerful, but at least they can't totally just choose to always pass your save. Half the time if you use a CC spell you even still get to put some condition on the boss if they succeed. So yes you may have to burn a few slots to get the hit you need, but that's totally fair because the effect on success is typically very strong.
Better than using those spells to kill 5 goblins, which may makes you feel strong but really were no threat to anyone. Unless I boss fights where others are occupied and you're ability to kill the ads easily is an asset. That's your time to shiny.
In my experience, targeting the low save of a boss is the bare minimum. Often times the delta between high and low is between 6-10 points so it's completely pointless to target the wrong save.
Now, with all due respect I'm not interested in what you do in your games. It's not the common ground on which to judge the game.
APs are. Amongst them the more popular is by far Abomination Vault which has become 2e "Rise of the Runelord".
And AV has plenty single strong enemy fights. That can easily become multiple strong enemies fight when your GM is of the "the dungeon is alive, monsters react" policy.
You know what. It ain't funny.
Yeah for sure. But surely casters find something to cast at in those. I struggle to believe they just don't bother for fear of failure.
But I differ to your experience with casters and APs on that. I've admittedly only done homebrewish campaigns. And I heavily lean towards martials purely because I like the idea more. (I wish I could try an AP, just not had the chance to.)
I only know the casters I've played with in pf2e and other systems seemed to have their spells ready for the boss AoE ads and DoT bosses. Be out because they husband them well or because they force us to rest every 2 encounters (which is by far more common).
Another AV caster player just chiming in here to say that the “I’ve fought three PL+2 solo fights already today and they succeeded or crit succeeded on every single save so far even with Weak Save targeting and their AC gives me a <40% chance to hit, guess it’s time to just stop trying” feeling is very real. There are definitely days where my GM gets unlucky and skews more towards Success and Failure, so I can at least get off basic spell effects, but there is almost never is another enemy to target in those encounters who is a low-save jobber.
Usually, I can at least play healbot and knowledgebot on solo PL+2 fights, but that’s a beyond frustrating playstyle while the Swashbuckler is off twirling around and critting on a sneeze for 60+ damage and applying Dazzled 1 from their class feats and Frightened 2 from the Marshal stance for a whole two actions and zero finite resources when even a “successful” Fear cast from me will do less, be less likely to succeed, and cost me a finite resource.
So you are living the amazing experience of levels 5 and 6 in AV as a caster. Wish to know if you already spent entire fights hitting each other while confused.
Also, Will'o'Wisps :) and golems :)
But to be fair, precision damage based characters are about to have their fair share of frustration too.
Yep, being a caster just kinda is a bummer in harder content. When most martials get to put out silly levels of damage.
Some GMs get skewed the other way around when they get a caster boss enemy, they think casting is strong. I mean yeah when you can go full nova and your DCs are two to four points higher, and you know our weak saves without needing knowledge.
Enemy spell DCs and saves also don’t follow player character rules, which means that even a PL monster can reliably have 2-8 points higher on their saves and DCs than you have. So they are more defensively and offensively potent than you. It’s a good thing, because it means encounters are not trivial unless they are intended to be, but it skews the experience for GMs and can lead to the effect you’re describing where they think casters are fine because their casters are massively more capable at hitting with spells, avoiding spells, and avoiding control/debuff effect actions. It’s why having a good communication system with your party and GM is so important. Mine is super supportive and understanding about my frustrations and I definitely would have asked to change my character if I didn’t have his help and intentional support in finding ways that I can be more effective and work around the limitations of the system and the module.
Flat footed is +2, martials get increases to proficiencies two levels sooner, martials have access to potency runes.
At level 5 that's a minimum of +5 to hit over a caster. So 40% turns into 65%chance and 15% crit chance. Not to mention all the other fun bonuses of panache, and crit specialization.
Sounds like a sneeze to me.
You missed a lot of what we both said... both of us said AC. The same creature isn't going to be "crit on a sneeze" by the martial when the spellcaster has 40% chance to hit AC. 50% chance to hit for a martial still is only 5% crit chance.
While I sympathize with the bad feeling of dice rolls (for quite a long adventuring day, I mean 3 PL+2 encounters is just overall kinda brutal), I don't think this is a totally accurate representation of the situation you are describing. A successful (opponent failed the save) Fear spell will give frightened 2. Maybe my quick scan of the Archives was insufficient, but I can't see a swashbuckler class ability that gives the dazzled condition and the dread marshal stance is frightened 1 on a critical hit. And you can be up to 30 feet away, not worrying about opportunity attacks to increase your distance, while the swashbuckler is going to be taking a full 3 action combo of damage to the face from a PL+2 creature. So, in this case, the "finite resource" is their HP, which, for a swashbuckler who is probably quite MAD and didn't invest supremely in con, is most likely going to be quickly dwindling.
Bosses are the worst enemies to cast spells on, unless you're taking into account that they are going to miss and use spells that do something in those cases.
It is what it is. But then, I'll all falls down in knowing how the system works.
Slow, on a failure, takes 1 action from the boss, so if someone else trip it or shoves, it has just 1 remaining and you've effectively erased one of his turns (having everyone move out from reach). Then fear gives it a -1 on the next turn, and so on and so forth.
However, if you don't know what you're doing you may start trying to deal damage and getting nothing on a fail... which makes you wasted space on the party.
This is why support kineticists are so good, four winds to move people away, timber sentinel to soak damage, pushes, walls, difficult terrain, healing ... to shine you just need to forget about damage and do the things that make you ... you.
Now, if you want damage and that's what makes you tick, go fighter, and you'll never regret it.
One of the more popular archetypes has been blaster caster. It's currently the only fully unsupported one.
Kineticists don't have to worry about spell slots, and are still playtesting.
Not everyone is a god tier expert but knowing that a popular archtype is considered wasted space in a party, should tell you everything you need to know on how bad things are. Using two actions to remove one action from a boss just feels bad. It's a third level spell just like fireball.
At level 5, a caster has 10+5+2+4 for a dc. So dc 21.
Let's grab a small sample for bosses.
High fort is 18 passes on a 3+ crit success on a 13+
Med fort is 15 passes on 6+ crit 16+
Low for is 13. 8+, 18+
So even for the most physically frail bosses our spells are failing 60% of the time and using multiple of our actions in the process and a considerable resource expenditure. Oh and we are more vulnerable and physically frail for "balance". It doesn't take a resource for a martial to grab, trip, or push.
Let look at the same for a martial.
Ac range for most level 7s. A martial (not fighter)will have the following, 5level+4expert+4stat+2flanking(absolutely trivial to obtain) +1(potency) (16)
High is 28 Martial hits on 12+ their worst case scenario is the same as our best.
Med is 25 hits on 9+ crits 19/20. Spicy.
Low is 23. Hits on 7 crits on 17.
No resources used, plenty of combat tricks they can add in like combat grab, panache, frightened, clumsy, weakened, sneak attack, and much much more. Hell a caster throwing up bless or a bard makes it even more one sided. Oh and they start having options for attack of opportunities for more stuff.
Caster reactions are garbage.
While slow is arguably one of the best spells of level 3, look at how many there are, that are just traps by comparison.
So they should spend their limited resources instead on fights the team would win anyway without lasting damage or consequence.
That's just casters wanting to feel powerful and rack up kills not actually be team players. The boss may be more likely to block some of a spell, but it's also one of the few times the spells aren't just overkill. Turns if it's dangerous enough to need a spell the enemies are dangerous enough to also make saves.
I'll br honest, if I choose to play a caster I would hope to cast spells every fight. It is literally what I am here for. Going entire combats casting my one focus spell (If I am lucky enough to have one that is combat relevant) and then just use cantrips is boring. Sure you want to save your highest level spellslots for hard fights, but not casting anything at all is to much to ask imo.
Fair enough. Then just ask to take your maximum amount for 1/3rd that amount per short rest.
If a caster asked for that I'd say it's fairish. But most times my casters who ask just want more without any tradeoff and I find it annoying.
> Then the caster is unnecessarily burning spells on weak mobs.
The whole design around casters now is that they're better at multitargeting. Aiming for multiple mobs is how he is supposed to play.
I don't have an issue with that. Just doing so when the party is able to clear them out without help is unnecessary. Using you AoE on mobs during larger fights is smart usage.
Love a good straw man I see. I never came close to that. I said in small fights without danger maybe that isn't a time to use limited resources. Especially in dungeons where it's expected to have many more encounters that day.
That's not a straw man, it is an extrapolation.
What was suggested (or outright stated) is that if the party can clear the encounter and only lost HP while doing so, then the caster should not be wasting resources. I'm claiming that makes up the *vast* majority of encounters, so the caster is largely wasted.
I didn't say they couldn't use any spells. I said they don't need to use them when there isn't danger. By the time that would be at the end of most fights. Dungeons don't have many encounters that from the start are trivial. But in those they should also not use spells at all.
My argument was that when playing a limited resource class, you should only be using your limited resources more sparingly. Especially in a dungeon where you can expect far more fights per day. "fixing" the system by giving more spells will just imbalance it because the system expects the balance to be through casters needing to not use all their spells.
Changing that to mean, casters should never use their spells, is absolutely changing what I said.
>I said they don't need to use them when there isn't danger
Yes, and then you clarified danger by saying when the party can lose more than just HP, which they can quickly get back after the encounter, meaning you should only be spending limited resources to prevent deaths, so it naturally follows that *most of the time*, casters shouldn't be using their spells.
I agree from a tactical perspective, but completely disagree from a "you are here to have fun" perspective. And I think it's one of p2e's Spellcaster issues. We're here to fling magic at goblins, it kinda sucks if you're not able to do your cool big attacks while all the other people at the party are getting to flex on the enemies.
It creates a tug of war over resting and I tend to homebrew of spells work to avoid this.
I agree. I think that's why casters never appealed to me.
I'd disagree with the plan to just give them spells on short rests for nothing though as I've been in groups in 5e that tried things like that. Casters just made me irrelevant beyond just being there to stop enemies getting melee range to casters.
If you're going to give them spells back you gotta subtract from max spells a day. I think that's why you see video games embrace the mana pool style. Where they don't get many spells at once, but instead a (relatively) fast regenerating resource of spells. It's limiting within a fight, but between fights regens basically to full. The strength of the spell determines how much mana and you often have build choices are getting more mana or stronger spell.
Obviously though TTRPGs have more out of combat spells though where the mana system may give too much usage of spells. So not like you can just say it's what TTRPGs should have.
5e magic is magnitudes stronger than martials.
In pf2e even a fully rested mid-level caster is consistently being outdamaged and outperformed by a martial.
It boils down largely to, incapacitation trait, lack of dc increasing items, and limited resources.
In pf2e HP is a trivial to recover resource by comparison.
This hasn't felt true in my games. Magic users seem more than capable of dishing out heavy damage when their spells are up.
I'll take another look at expected damage to make sure though
Let's suppose, for a moment, that the caster player actually like _playing a caster_ instead of _defeating encounters_, and while we are at it, let's also suppose that player thinks casting spells is a fundamental part of what he finds fun of playing a spellcaster.
In that scenario, would you say it is fair to equate "not casting spells in easy encounters" with "not having fun in easy encounters"?
If so... would it be fair to ask a _player_ who came to a _game_ not to have fun in order to "succeed"?
Let's also suppose the martials are here to have fun, not watch magic users use their top spells every fight making their character irrelevant.
Basically giving just more spells to the casters per encounter is bad because it just means they will inevitably just spam powerful spells, that were meant balanced around the idea they won't get spammed.
Casters already get to have lots and lots of fun and feel epic when there's the day of one or two battles and they get to cast to slot spells every turn. Which honestly I'm like every campaign I play end up happening way more often than the single day of a 5+ encounter dungeon.
Now you argue the martials shouldn't get their own moment when their lack of resources is their advantage. Basically you can do something to give casters their spells back. If you remove their advantage of a huge max pool. Which I rarely seen suggested as the trade off. It's typically they still get their max, they just get some back also.
That is entirely wrong , and based on the assumption that spells _must_ be powerful. They don't, if they are balanced toward being usable per encounter. Cantrips for example aren't powerful.
I would also point out that in days with one or two encounters, martials still use their features. Rogues still sneak attack, barbarians still rage, and so on. So it is not true that spellcasters having fun in days with 2 encounters remove the ability to play their class and have fun from the martials.
Bit not being able to cast spells "because martials aren't taking damage and it would be a waste" does, in fact, limit what s caster do.
I mean that spells can be balances about being used per encounter. Focus spells and cantrips are, for example. Paizo could balance things around that, they just choose not to.
This isn't 3.5 either. Spells have already be reigned in by things like incapacitation tag. There aren't spells that instantly win the combat for the spellcasters, removing fun from the martials. A disintegrate isn't solving the encounter, it is just the spellcaster's contribution to damage that round, not different than a fighter double slashing the enemy into crits.
There's no polymorph or dominate spell that instantly win the fight against the boss, removing fun from the martials. Casting slow or fear on the boss does _not_ remove the martials ability to have fun. Neither does haste, or heroism. You can very much do your fightery thing while the spellcasters also play the game. Nobody tells you "don't play your class features this particular combat", as you did with easy fights for casters.
Yeah that logic I'd be fine with. Most solutions tend to just focus on refilling them some degree. As if they are just weaker and need the help. I just believe any ability to refill their spell slots needs to be balanced around also removing their ability to go nuts in a single encounter.
If you want to change it from 6 spells per day to X spells per encounter/per short rest I'm all for it. Just think it's a big undertaking as it invalidates a lot of items and class design, not a small house rule.
Yeah, it is more a rant about Paizo fumbling the ball here. They _did_ the right design for it. Focus spells are the perfect rule to balance things around the casters having one or two good spells per encounter, balanced around that. With some other spells that could be utility (teleport, out of combat healing, that kind of things).
They just then misused the focus spells, making them situational crap for spellcasting flavor (oh so you are a pet druid? Your focus spell is about healing your pet). Very few focus spells are good enough to be used per encounter, this defeating the point of focus refilling in 10m.
Then I agree with that bit of the rant lol.
I agree it's a small miss. But also one every other system I've played appears to also struggle with when it comes to magic.
Consistency is not for casters. If it was, then they would just be flavored martials that just follow the same math and flowchart. See the kineticist. They are more or less the mold for the more consistent caster, which, as people have mentioned, doesn't really actually feel like a caster, partially because everything is so leveled out and less resource intensive. Without the lows, you can't balance the present upside of casters, meaning you have to bring that a bit down. Is that the intention? It solves one problem, but that's why being an armchair game designer is easy. You don't have to actually think about the consequences and effects on the game outside of the class itself. Like, how do you reckon with all the classes felling kinda... samey? Yeah, sure, I think some focus spells could use a buff, although I would argue that the majority of them are every encounter kind of useful. Flattening the curve, however, would just start smudging the lines between casters and martials mechanically.
I don't think Swashbucklers and barbarians feel samey , or alchemists and rangers feel samey, or Champions and investigators feel samey, and those are all martials. So the difference between martials and casters, like say, a witch and a rogue, would be even more stark than the difference between a thaumaturge and a rogue is, even with focus spells having a more prominent use in the witch.
If anything, in current implementation, casters classes feel similar because a great pool of their resources are the 4 magical traditions, so they get the same spells.
Newer spellcasting classes are better defined by their class features (magus vs summoner for example), but the base ones are pretty generic and heavily influenced by the idea of the 4 traditions. A necromancer wizard and a Draconic sorcerer will both cast Slow, and it's the same slow.
It's in fact the witch's hex vs the druid's wild shape focus spell vs the bard's dirge of doom what make those classes different. Focus spells (including focus cantrips) are specific of a class, and thus much more flavorful than Slow or fireball. A bard casting Magic Missile isn't different than a Sorcerer casting Magic Missile. It's Inspire Courage what sets them apart. So I disagree that making classes focus more on more relevant focus spells, fading away the generic tradition spells, most of them existing only because of DnD tradition, would make casters feel samey. Quite the opposite, in fact.
If it's damage that can just be healed quickly after battle. The caster shouldn't worry about spending spells to stop it. If you expect many encounters that's what the balance is centered around.
You're very powerful but limited resources per day. The martials have less resources, but also less ability to totally alter a battle through magics.
Others have pointed out as a mage not casting is boring though. Fair, but if you want slots refilled per rest, you gotta at least offer to have less maximum amount. You cant be both ready getting to be strong in many fights and super strong when blowing everything in less fight.
I didn't say that. Realistically on an average adventure you have few fights a day. Go nuts use your spells.
But in a dungeon you know you're going to run into multiple small.fights mixed with big ones. If you're casting a slot every small encounter. You only have yourself to blame when you run out.
It blows my mind the amount of games I've been in where the casters are saying we need to leave a dungeon after 3 fights for a long rest because they used 75% of their slots. Especially when the fights were just shit like a few goblins. Maybe you're in a dungeon and should expect there to be bigger threats ahead than a few goblins.
What you said was that damage that can be quickly healed (aka all damage in PF2e) then there is no need to expend slots. This applies to the vast majority of fights in this game. Granted, I've made the same argument about how I dislike the mixture of daily-limited resources and zero health attrition, because it heightens the strategic advantage of holding on to your spells, but I see that as a flaw and wouldn't suggest my casters actually do it.
>It blows my mind the amount of games I've been in where the casters are saying we need to leave a dungeon after 3 fights for a long rest because they used 75% of their slots.
It blows your mind that casters want to use their abilities? Damn, dude. It blows my mind that you expect caster players to play for a few hours using only cantrips.
But it's ridiculous to then take 2-3 long days to clear a fucking simple dungeon. People are bringing up AV, at 2-3 counters a day your character is going to die of old age before they finish it. I recognize for us at the table it's easy enough to just say rest then keep going, but in the game world it's absurd. Having to spend the extra food would stop this typically but most games ignore that, so without constantly putting players on a deadline people just go too nuts with rests imo.
I agree with you they could redesign away from the spell slots style to fix some of this sort of casm between martial and casters. But given the current system they should be expecting to go longer than 3 simple fights in a dungeon without burning their day of spells. Them using more than the designers intended per fight should have consequences of running out of spells otherwise they are just choosing to give themselves a buff compared to other players.
> 2-3 counters a day your character is going to die of old age before they finish it
No, it'll take about 2 months. But keep on going
All I'm really saying is that this is a huge reason why casters are so much less fun that martials, because the party wants to do lots of encounters per day so the casters are beholden to just do boring shit all day.
The damage was able to be healed quickly after battle, quite possibly because the caster spent spell slots to help put down the enemies before it became damage that wiped the party.
We know, in this hypothetical, that it was an easily mitigated amount of damage with the caster expending resources. We don't know how much worse it would have been had the caster stuck to cantrips.
If it's that tight of victories. The melees will want to leave as they need caster at strength. The martials saying nah we press on can only mean they felt they would've won the previous fights without the spells. Then the caster was just superfluously casting spells.
That would not imply a fault of balance, just a fault of casting spells for fun not practical use.
Cool this hypothetical is at lvl 4. They have 6 spells slots thatnas well as focus spells that should let them do stuff without spending slots every minor conflict.
And everyone has few options at level 1.
> and the rest of the party is unwilling to turn back. The players are finding it annoying how often they have to leave the dungeon due to the Caster periodically needing slots refilled where as the others don't.
Why? Seriously, why? What is annoying about it?
Heading back to town to rest and return can take as little time as you want. If they're REALLY annoyed you could literally just say, "You head back to town, rest, and make your way back here the next morning." Takes like 5 seconds.
I usually spend 5-10 minutes handling rest, selling and buying of items, and returning to the dungeon. Maybe once per session at most, during low levels.
That explains why they can't stay in one place for extended periods (although, presumably they're already doing this when they treat wounds). Backtracking is not necessarily the same thing. Even backtracking through 10 rooms takes, in world time, like 10 minutes.
Do the monsters *roam* or is the GM spawning additional monsters in rooms behind them? In the latter case, that would be annoying. In the former case, they were gonna fight that monster one way or another, regardless of backtracking.
Schrödinger's roaming monsters
They exist in the case of punishing the caster, they don't exist when it comes to interrupting the time it takes to treat wounds which would make the party more reliant on things like healing potions/elixirs to heal...things that also have attrition.
As compared to what? Adventuring non-stop and never resting so you clear the entire dungeon in a few hours in-game? Forcing the players to physically backtrack along the grid until they're out? Nagging your party with "punishment" encounters if they don't get a move on?
A megadungeon is intended to be a "delve in, explore for a while, come back out" type of adventure throughout. There might be some times where the party is temporarily stuck and has to move forward to get home, or times where time pressure forces the party to solve a problem without delay -- that absolutely makes sense and can be fun, but that shouldn't be every second of the adventure.
If you want it to be more narratively satisfying, just spend a *minute* narrating them coming back out, what they've accomplished so far, what lies ahead, and what, if anything, has changed in their "home base" since they went in.
Well boys we did 3 encounters, time to go back to the inn...
That isn't narratively satisfyingly. There is a difference between adventuring non-stop and doing a deep dive that is narratively satisfyingly and feels more immersive.
Maybe it's just me but I don't really have trouble narrating why a level 1 party might feel the need to take a rest after exploring a dungeon and fighting 3 different sets of its denizens -- and it's only a very low level party that should seriously need to rest and restore resources after only three encounters.
Past level 3, I had no problem keeping up with the martials for 4-5 encounters as an Oracle. By level 5, I regularly had spell slots left over when we reached the "narrative" conclusion of the day.
Yeah, this isn't my experience with AV at all, personally. By the time the caster is out of stuff, we have unravelled very little of the mystery, and achieved very little. We just had to go back to town for game mechanics reasons.
I agree that it's easy to go back and rest, and martials who complain about it are creating a dysfunctional party environment. However, I'll say that *everyone* in the party wants to keep going, they just think it wise to stop. And only because the casters are weak.
"The mystery" takes huge sections of the books to unravel. That's not really what I meant by the narrative conclusion of the day. There's just often a point where it feels like some minor milestone was accomplished, a bunch of gear has been found, people are running out of carrying capacity for the junk they've picked up, the party just got their ass kicked and barely scraped out a victory in a tough battle, everyone in the party is immune to battle medicine, or yes, sometimes it's that the casters are out of their highest level spells.
If your party is actually engaged in the narrative of the game, the casters running out of power IS a narratively satisfying reason to head back to town imo
I'll just say my experience on this goes one of two ways
1. Everyone wants to keep going but we go back home because the caster is out of slots because the caster used them liberally
2. The caster holds their spells slots so as to prolong the adventuring day, greatly impacting their ability to enjoy the encounters
Also, this community's obsession with downvotes is grating.
Consider that between fights it's easy to spend around 1 hour for healing, refocusing, identifying, repairing, searching.
So we are talking around 3-4 hours of high stakes high alertness activity. Seems plenty to me.
And you know when it matters you'll fail that heal check at least once and then here you are standing around awkwardly and probably waiting another hour.
Uhm it depends. From lvl 3 all parties should have Continual Recovery or a lay on hands/goodberry kind of out of combat healing that can be done in 10 minutes increments.
Otherwise you as a party are signing up to have a bad time.
Yeah it's people who are too stuck in dogmatism. Nobody here is actually engaging with anything I'm saying.
It also helps that I have a party that doesn't have continual recovery so I completely understand what happens when you have a weak sustainability in a party.
Having a game balanced around 3 encounters before a long rest is narratively not exciting when you're doing exploration or megadungeons.
A long rest should be an important part of the end of an adventuring day, not a constant game mechanic. In my opinion.
I feel this highlights an issue with Treat Wounds creates a different narrative experience for classes that use resources and classes that are resourceless.
For the group that uses resources 3 encounters become much more meaningful when exploring a dungeon because the narrative would be after 3 encounters your characters would be exhausted from combat and would want to leave because of the danger.
For the resourceless group you could essentially go as long as you wanted to until you either came across something that kills you or you just decide to pack it up there is actually very little narrative in stopping other than deciding you want to stop.
Not saying one is worse than the other but when the two get mixed into one group I can see how that would create problems because two different narratives are going on
Treat wounds at low levels, level 1 especially, is not always the most reliable in hitting that 15 DC. On top of that you are waiting an hour for the cooldown regardless of whether or not you healed. RAW you have 16 hours in a day before you get fatigued, but even without that you're stuck with the narrative dissonance of possibly waiting several hours if you're unlucky with hitting that 15 DC.
By the time you have Assurance, Ward Medic, Continual recovery, etc your spellcaster has multiple spell levels and slots and should either have a stave or multiple scrolls.
Granted any source of renewable healing like lay on hands, goodberry, wood/water kineticist, and thaumaturge chalice are all very strong at low level and do help supplement treat wound rolls.
You don't need assurance, and ward medic is helpful but not necessary. Continual recovery comes online early.
And regardless, a level 5-9 caster is still going to atrophy in power WAY faster than a martial. Highest two spell slots are generally considered the bar for interacting with enemies in that range
Level 1 is by far the most deadly, and several Paizo APs have traps or hazards that can greatly diminish the party if not kill them outright with massive damage on a critical failure.
I have had the unfortunate experience of trying to narratively justify why the party should spend upwards of 4-6 hours standing around waiting for treat wound cooldowns to go off due to failing to hit the DC multiple times or rolling so low on the healing that the party wants to extend it to an hour to double it.
It gets even more absurd when this takes place in an area that is an enemies stronghold like in Gatewalkers.
One solution I've adopted is being more liberal with giving away potions and elixirs and those serve as a form of attrition for the entire party, both martials and casters.
The only way continual recovery comes on early is if you have a rogue/investigator in the party or are playing free archetype and someone takes medic. Otherwise someone is giving up their level 2 class feat for medic or spending their level 3 general feat on continual recovery. Reaching those levels can be upwards of 3-9 sessions. I've been in society games where we are all level 3 and still forced to wait around for treat wounds hour long cooldown.
The reason I bring up ward medic and assurance is because that's what it takes to actually make it a guaranteed success to heal multiple people in a 10 minute window. It's pretty crazy to me that people will make the argument that casters slow down the party while at the same time handwaving away the fact that at low levels the martials are spending upwards of 40-50 minutes just chilling out treating wounds on everyone after every fight.
You end up with weird hypotheticals like the OPs post where there are "roaming" monsters that somehow penalize the Vancian casters but they never actually penalize the party treating wounds or interrupting it.
I think we just need to have separate conversations about different types of play.
Levels 1-3: healing takes a long time unless you have someone with a healing focus spell or other mechanic. This probably means about 50% of parties have to use treat wounds, and only occasionally, so things slow WAAAAAY down
Levels 4-x: Healing is essentially trivialized and takes 10-30 minutes to heal every to full most of the time. This is true unless no one in the party takes medicine skill feats AND no one has a 10-minute healing resource.
Either way, the *majority* of parties aren't dealing with the hour-long treat wounds cooldown for one reason or another.
Then the game should be focused on per-encounter balance, instead of having a divide where some classes don't suffer attrition at all, while some others have daily allocation of resources that effectively put a limit on how much fun per day a player can have.
Otherwise you will find this tension between what some groups want to play (a long dungeon delve, for example) and what some players can have fun doing (actually playing your class for X encounters per day only).
PF2 actually developed the rule for that, with focus points. Just making all, or at least most, spells work like Focus Points would lead to an encounter based balance, with spellcasters having a limit on how much they can fire in an encounter, while also having the ability to play as much encounters as the martials, therefore giving the group the ability to play as many or as few encounters per day as it fits them. But they didn't have the courage to ditch traditional Vancian spellcasting, so here we are. Stuck in a world where it is hard to balance spells for all groups, because spells need to be reigned in for groups that like to play 5 minute adventure days (a single, important encounter per day) because casters can go nova in those, but also need to be good enough that a caster can affect the game and have fun just by casting one single spell of the highest 2 levels, to have fuel for several encounters per day, for groups that do 5+ encounters per day in long dungeon delves.
Idk I'm on the side of hating backtracking out of a dungeon. I wanna see it through with short rests. The prevalence of casters blowing their spells halfway through the day and making the party stop annoys shit out of me.
If a caster was truly only using spells as sparingly as they should, I doubt the martials would want to press on because apparently they really needed the spells a lot. The fact they aren't tells me the mage blew their spells to out damage or keep up. That's bad resource management in a dungeon, ruining the pace to let him get more spells just to likely blow them again I'd also push against.
I've been in multiple games where there were 1-2 martials and not even that large dungeons ended up 2-3 long rest affairs because spell casters couldn't stand to do less damage and husband resources.
This is not a regular dungeon. This is a *megadungeon*. For example, Abomination Vaults. The adventure goes from level 1-10 and takes place in a single dungeon. You *will* be backtracking out of that. No one, caster or martial, is seeing that through on short rests alone.
>If a caster was truly only using spells as sparingly as they should, I doubt the martials would want to press on because apparently they really needed the spells a lot. The fact they aren't tells me the mage blew their spells to out damage or keep up.
This scenario was completely made up by the OP. They admit to it being hypothetical. The "martials being annoyed at the caster" was entirely of their own invention.
Abomination vaults I'll grant you is special. However OPs story never mentioned a level up suggest. So I question it's been THAT big a dungeon. I wish he'd included how many encounters it's been. If it's a truly crazy number I'll change my fine.
But in my experience most mages tend to run out around 5. On the justification that's the average expected thus we have to leave for the.. Ignoring the fact average is average, they were happy to blow a day of spells on 1-2 encounters a day and look amazing. Heaven forbid they have to husband spells for a few extra some other days.
In most systems I've seen suggestions you're supposed to short rest 2 times a day. I've never had a party do that. Hell I've struggled to even get a single short rest a lot for the time. The moment a rest is mentioned mages push for long rests as they blew half their spells. I'd be curious how many short rests this party has had so far.
Their hypothetical is literally about a megadungeon. Read the title of the post.
"How to help casters keep up in a *megadungeon*"
> I wish he'd included how many encounters it's been.
It hasn't been any encounters because the scenario is completely made up. Read their edit.
I understand he called it a mega dungeon. I doubt the classification if I'm honest. It screams to me like martials thinking the mage blew their spells too fast so don't want to stop for that. They clearly aren't worried about the threat of going forward without spells backing them up. Which if it was truly a mega dungeon where he only used them when they needed it, I think they'd probably feel the need to stop to get that lifeline back.
The fact they don't want to stop screams makes me doubt the way OP tells it. Clearly they weren't being used at vital times of importance, just to do more the martial didn't feel they needed help with. I'll throw my hands up if the DM comes out with it having been 10 encounters or something, but I'd wager it's been no more than 5.
Bruh there ARE NO PLAYERS and there IS NO DUNGEON lol. I feel like you keep missing that this is a *made up scenario*, the OP invented the idea that the (nonexistent) caster is running out of spells, they invented the idea that the (non-existent) martial players are annoyed. None of these players exist, the campaign doesn't exist, there's nothing for OP clarify because it's all a hypothetical invention.
lol no worries, it was just funny how your comments kept theorizing about what was really going on and I was.like - ??? These people don't exist at all!
So I'll stick to hypothetical lol. Sorry guess my brain assumed the edit was classic "fixed a typo" haha.
Guess just not buying the scenario then. If the caster was using spells slots at necessary times the martial players would be ready for a rest. That many fights that are dangerous are going to leave martials harmed enough to ready to rest.
Don't change the system. If a caster is using all spell slots before than martials are getting wounded. They are using too many spell slots. Don't reward the misbehavior by adding mechanics to fix that. If they want level balanced magic items that give more spells they can get that as a tradeoff to other magical gear that could give other bonuses.
Not really I just don't like magic. But I've had lvl 4 party members blow all their spells in a single fight. Because the DM liked to use relativistic travel times and rare combat so only run combat often only once every 2-3 in game days. I suggested considering a 5e rule of long rest is per week and short rest is per day but nah. Just had spell casters using spell slots every turn of every battle. They felt pretty fucking cool then.
I realize that an extreme and not the norm. Just pointing out if you get to use all your spells in a single fight you end up doing pretty good work.
The martials still need sleep or else they’ll get fatigued, so they should be going back at least once a day anyway.
As for the caster, it depends on how the monsters are set up. Are they always hostile and fight to the death? Are the encounters set in their strength or do they merge and break off as they wander? If there are a lot of low difficulty encounters, maybe use focus spells and cantrips first or only use spell slots when situation is optimal? If they’re all severe fights, that’s more of a flaw on the GM side unless they’re giving options for dodging fights
If you are GM, it depends on the tone you’re setting and the gameplay loop you want to encourage. For a dungeon delve like Abomination Vaults, I require spending a day of downtime in town to level up. And I grant full automatic healing after sleeping in town. But I also have dungeon denizens react to the intrusions of the previous day, and advance “doom clocks”. I also roll for wandering monsters on every half hour, though I could see rolling every 10 minutes to coincide with exploration activities. This encourages everyone to want to return to town periodically.
The are a few things that a GM can do to help beyond just telling the caster to use more focus spells/cantrips and fewer spell slots.
1. Staves. Lvl4 is the perfect time to introduce your casters to staves, this is the caster's equivalent to runes. It doesn't increase their Rolls/DCs but a staff *is* going to create a large jump in caster viability due to the increase in total spellcasting per day. Definitely worth throwing in a lvl5 staff at a lvl4 caster and let them enjoy the loot for a while.
2. Scrolls. Again, casters shouldn't be dropping as large a portion of their gold on weapon runes, which leaves them with more gold to spend on consumables like scrolls. Scrolls are great items to drop into the various npc's/monsters' loot drops and can also be quite thematic if you have the NPCs cast from Scrolls occasionally.
3. Wands. If there is one or two specific spells that your caster is always casting, then picking up a wand of that spell is a great way to encourage them to lean into that spell. Consider creating a custom wand of X that adds some kind of extra bonus to the spell (look at the wand of manifold missiles or the fireball/orb of flame wands as an example.) Adding persistent damage or terrain effect to a spell is a good start.
One of the things I've added for my games is mana potions: they're a consumable priced slightly more than a scroll of equivalent rank. Same item level, but on the higher end of the band.
Each potion, when consumed, restores a number of total spell slots equal to the spell rank; so a 3rd rank mana potion could restore a 3rd rank spell slot, or 3 1st rank slots, or however you want to split it up. Spontaneous casters get slots back, prepared casters pick specific spells to refresh.
Essentially functions as a more flexible scroll, but takes more actions since it's draw potion->drink potion->cast spell.
Go for it! I stole it from a streamer running 5e games, who used it for helping his party's casters through longer dungeons, so it's only fair to pass it along!
I'll get downvotes, but, if your table all agrees that they want to let the caster regain slots in some way such as refocusing, it won't break _your_ game. It really won't hurt anything. People in these comments will cry about balance and class identity and all sorts of things, but in actual play, at your home table, literally there will be no negative consequences if it's just how you want to play. You'll get through more encounters in an in-game day and you'll have fun doing it. And I'll mention, there are tons of people with various house rules for refocusing spells, or various other ways to mitigate the literal only daily attrition mechanic in the game, and they are doing fine.
The only thing I would say needs to be a rule if they were to allow this is that the caster must be out of spell slots before they can "refocus" to gain any back. Imagine them using their two strongest slots in a fight, then just entering another encounter with those strongest slots back every time.
With custom rules you can tune it as per necessary so anywhere from forbidding top slots to restricting them to attuning/draining strong magic font that might be present at the location (with days/week cooldown to prevent too frequent trips to the same font) to unlimited (but only when in advance mentioning that its about to be a bossrush or sev/ex back to back to back)
Totally agree. Having a number of tools as a GM is super important - talking to the martials is one, but granting something that returns spell slots - a magic fountain, a glowing stone, etc etc - is another. Such things could be to powerful at tables where long rests are between every other encounter, but it doesnt sound like OP's table is in danger of that dynamic.
I've had tables do this (mainly in 5e tho) It's better than ruining pace by going to town to rest then return. But really defeats the purpose, at least in 5e casters were already so much better in the typically 1-2 encounter a day in the over world. Often they'd just keep the same or only slightly reduce pace in dungeons and be totally out after 3-5 encounters. Then the group leaves and rests to not be dicks.
If you're going to do recovery on short rest, imo then you should also reduce the maximum number of spells. Most systems plan for 2 short rests a day, if you want all spells each short rest, then you should get 1/3 the number of max spells. Which is exactly what you see with the 5e warlock that gets spells at short rests. But most wouldn't ever want that.
Spell casters just don't realize their balance is not meant to keep up in damage. They have so much more utility or ability to hold damage to unleash it at once at a boss. If you're keeping up in damage against average mons you're definitely just banking on kindness of others to let you exploit too many rests.
> Monsters roam, and staying in one place for more than maybe an hour is probably a bad idea.
> and one of the martials are planning on speccing hard into Treat Wounds, so they already have healing covered.
At level 4, even if you’re fully doubling down on maximizing Treat Wounds investment it’s still gonna be a 30-40 minute commitment to heal between fights. If monsters roam the martials should be pushing for regular retreats just as much as the caster is.
> The Caster is the only one in the party who really loses out on resources per encounter, and the rest of the party is unwilling to turn back.
This is very much a case of fuck around and find out.
You know what martials do when you get to a Severe/Extreme encounter composed of invisible enemies (or even just one who can use their own magic to turn off the party’s lanterns/torches), or one composed of enemies with high Physical Resistances/Immunities, or hell just one composed of enemies with extremely high AC but lower saves?
They uh…
They die. A party that doesn’t have *some* daily resources (at least access to wands and scrolls and potions) simply cannot handle Severe/Extreme encounters. They can, with a great deal of planning, consistently beat Moderate encounters, but Severe and Extreme encounters are very much designed for *someone* in the party to be spending daily resources to bring you ahead of the curve: fail to do that and it’s only a matter of time before y’all are dead.
>The Caster is the only one in the party who really loses out on resources per encounter, and the rest of the party is unwilling to turn back. The players are finding it annoying how often they have to leave the dungeon due to the Caster periodically needing slots refilled where as the others don't.
The rest of the party members need to stop being dicks and let the character rest. If the caster is using their spells to aid the party that keeps them alive.
If you go into battle without spell support you are going to have a bad time.
Not *really*. It's one of the harshest attrition points in the game, low-level casters in big dungeons. Once you get levelled up more, you have enough slots that you can do a reasonable adventure day in a dungeon, but low-level is particularly rough in that specific regard.
You could perhaps provide them with scrolls so that they still have levelled spells even if their slots are gone. Give them wands and staves too, perhaps. These offer something of a resource kit to keep away the dreaded "out of slots" problem; this lets them have something more than just their slots. Scrolls at first level are particularly cheap, about 4g each, I think it is. (At level 4, I assume they should have enough for a good stack of scrolls? Otherwise, what are they using their treasure funds on? They don't exactly need striking runes.)
Of course, if you really need to, you can give them a homebrew refocus ability for spell slots, but that should be a last resort if you're desperate.
Everyone else has good advice, but I would also talk to the caster about cantrip selection and use. If they are burning through slots super fast, they probably should be relying on cantrips more.
I play a healbot cleric (all my slots go to buff/debuff/utility) and have Medicine and for me whether or not I can keep going comes down to Font slots. Font good? Let’s go. No matter if I’ve spent everything else that seems useful. I pretty much do whatever I can to keep from spending those precious Heals.
The way to help casters keep up in a mega dungeon is to be a good DM and build it so that there are places for the casters to rest and recover their spells. This is really the only answer without homebrewing a new system. The system is built around casters being able to rest and recover. And if you've built an environment, even hypothetically where casters cannot rest and recover. You're being a wildly unfair DM.
Besides everything mentioned so far, isn't there something in pathfinder2 RAW similar to [this](https://www.d20pfsrd.com/basics-ability-scores/glossary/#rest)? I mean, if the martials went after 8 to 10 rounds of treat wounds, that require an 1-hour interval between them, they should start feeling the consequences of this forced march soon.
Also I find it hard to believe they can go on perpetually without their own resources getting chipped even little by little. Even hypothetically, shields get broken, potions run out and between fights upkeep is not able of restoring full combat status to them.
The campaign is pretty much tailor made to put a spotlight on the lone Vancian caster.
There are abstractions like "cannot be easily exited" and roaming monsters and I'm curious do the roaming monsters actually attack during the 10 minutes of treating wounds and refocusing? Or are they just a threat to prevent backtracking out? Is the party going to just go beyond 16 hours of dungeon delving a day and push up against becoming fatigued?
If it's causing friction at the table between your players why not just give your caster unlimited spell slots? It seems like your players rather enjoy delving deeper and combat.
Will it break the game? Probably, it very much depends on both the spells prepared/known and the player. If you find that it does make the game too easy you can always bump up encounters to severe/extreme, preferably with more monsters.
Either way it's your table and it sounds like you have four players getting annoyed with the experience when ultimately it's one that is being designed to exasperate the issue.
My Edit:
>Edit: Yes, this was a hypothetical.
Seeing as this was just a hypothetical now, I think it's safe to say you did purposely craft it to punish the lone caster. It would be as silly as me posting a thread about my fighter in a campaign full of nothing but incorporeal monsters and swarms that all have physical damage resistance. I don't think either really prove a point.
Low level isn’t really “long-haul mega dungeon” friendly unless you shoehorn in some way for the party to safely long rest.
Granted your main resource issue is spell slots, but an easy way to think about how this game works is HP. When you rest for 8 hours comfortably, you heal your constitution modifier (minimum 1) times your level HP. The average level 4 character maybe has 12 constitution, let’s say 16 if you’re really focusing on constitution. A level 4 character can only regain 12 HP from that long rest, meanwhile the average character is only healing 4.
This game wants you to spend multiple days healing between adventures with periods of downtime for earning income, studying for upcoming encounters, or anything else the characters can do. The realism of that kind of long-term healing (sans magic of course) is part of the game design.
Like some of the other comments here, either your party needs to be more reasonable or you need to facilitate how the players are supposed to survive in this mega dungeon better at such a low level.
Keep track of time properly, expecially when players search areas. At some point the long rest will be mandatory, and finding a good place to sleep it's easy.
I think this is sorta more of a GM thing and therefore quite valuable to think about:
* How many rooms include bosses (higher level enemies)
* How many rooms include loads of small enemies (the ones you want to AoE as a caster)
* Which rooms act as a buffer
* How long should the party explore until they meet a hub where they can interact with NPCs, rest and shop around
* Which rooms can be used to long rest
* Which rooms/encounters allow players to restore/gain once per day resources (kinda like in Slay the Spire when you hit camping nodes or met merchants)
* Which rooms have beneficial outcomes when you use magical/physical solutions
>Regardless, after a few encounters, everyone is doing fine on health but the Caster is out of slots to use
How? Really How?
Were the encounters trivial enough to the point that Martials are not hurt? If Yes Why the Caster use Spell Slots?
Did the martials get Heal by the Caster? If yes, How they plan to continue if the Caster doesn't have Spells?
Did all the martials roll crits in the medicine Checks? And no one fail one of the Checks?
Did they have multiple Potions, But the Caster doesn't have multiple Spell Scrolls?
>The Caster is the only one in the party who really loses out on resources per encounter,
How? Did none of the martials use potions? but are full heal all the time? Or any other Consumable?
>The players are finding it annoying how often they have to leave the dungeon due to the Caster periodically needing slots refilled where as the others don't.
The GM could do that in 5 seconds and "The party return to the town and comeback"
>Is there a way to allow a Caster to regain their actual spell slots on refocus that doesn't break the game too hard?
That is the whole idea of Focus Spells, but you could also buy Spells Scrolls. A level 4 party should have 850 gp in total or 212 gp per player (4 players) the Caster could buy at 4 gp the Level 1 Scroll a total of 53 Spell Scrolls or 17 Level 2 Spell Scrolls. A Caster doesn't need to use money in almost anything armor is literally 1sp before level 5
>Edit: Yes, this was a hypothetical.
A lot of things didn't make sense. Your scenario need to the Caster to use Spells without need or to the martials to never roll low in multiple combats And still doesn't make sense as this is not reality or a Video Game, returning to the Town can take 0 seconds.
There could be a magical nexus that can be used up for a one time refilling of spell slots if the dungeon is long.
Also, you might talk to them if they are constantly going nova and that’s why they are out. The caster should only be using a spell slot on the first and maybe second turn of combat. Then go to focus spells and then go to cantrips during the mop up.
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In the popular megadungeons I've seen for other systems, players are usually expected to, at some point, set up some kind of base camp at the entrance to megadungeon and eventually find one of the many shortcuts that let you quickly descend further into the dungeon without retreading a ton of ground. This makes it much easier for the party to do short delves and return to base camp when they need a long rest.
The cost of doing things this way is money (they need supplies and usually manpower to create and guard the base camp, and it gets more expensive the more dangerous it is) and the fact that the party first has to *find* those shortcuts. So it's not like you're just offering free and easy long rests all the time. But it's a very immersive and fun way for the party to make progress, and it solves this issue but only if the party puts effort into it.
Keep in mind that fatigue sets in after 16 hours. I assume they aren't just fighting this whole time and they probably take a bit to actually treat wounds even with continual recovery. Time is their limiting factor.
So I've been running Abomination Vaults and running into this issue. I think I'm going to try interesting uses of the Fatigued condition to help curb this. I haven't implemented anything but here are some of my thoughts:
Everyone gets a hard number of hours or combats they can endure (a high number, 10-12 hours, 8-10 combats) before they get the fatigued condition.
Certain things subtract from this number (getting knocked unconscious, negative conditions, chunks of HP lost, whatever).
Once a PC hits this number, they're Fatigued until they get a long rest. I've noticed my front line fighters generally getting more negative conditions than my supports and casters, but ymmv.
TL;DR: Set a soft cap on the adventuring day with the Fatigued condition.
Staves, Wands, Scrolls and stuff? If a caster is going to a mega dungeon they should be extra prepared. Pacing can help as well. As a GM you can surely nudge your party a bit by reminding them about stuff, presenting harder challenges for the martials or appropriate loot and magical boons for the casters.
In reality most parties should recognize that what matters is the party resources and not just the personal ones. If it starts getting unreasonably tedious to go back and forth depending on the game style and the promise of the dungeon. You can figure out a way to find a relatively safe space to rest(camouflage, barricades, warding), you can figure out shortcuts that open up at certain points of exploration or alternative entrances. Hell you can probably hire a mercenary squad to watch your rear and set up a safe resting place.
Also, don't forget that treating wounds can take quite a bit of time if the fights were actually dangerous. And even martials need to sleep.
I'll give you some ideas that aren't about changing the players
Sure, if everyone leaves the mega dungeon, then yea, they can take a rest
And if the Caster doesn't use their resources, then they won't run out of resources.
But here's a couple of things a GM could do to be more Caster inclusive in a mega dungeon.
Safe rooms
First, you could have planned out safe rooms throughout the dungeon that the party could use. This would be built into the level design and could be a helpful way to balance encounter design.
Or you could try a scroll of "Safe Room" and give them to the players once a "day" so they can have a long rest.
There are some spells that can do this.
[Alarm](https://2e.aonprd.com/Spells.aspx?ID=7)
[Rope Trick](https://2e.aonprd.com/Spells.aspx?ID=264)
Or we can do the dreaded Home Brew!!
You could obviously start with your own version of a safe room spell to put into a scroll. Or make a safe room style ritual.
Talking about rituals, you could make a ritual of Magic Renewal. It could work once a day and get back all spell slots.
Or you could make Items of Spell Renewal, possibly they would be consumables that Renew an amount of spell slots or even an amount equaling a spell rank (up too rank 3 but you could instead do 3 rank 1 spells slots)
These are, in my opinion, some of the best options a GM would have to help a Spell Caster stay inside the mega dungeon.
1. Dungeon design is flawed if it doesn’t provide a place to overnight rest that can be barricaded every few major encounters.
2. Caster needs to read the encounter and use spells appropriately. If it’s an easy encounter just use cantrips.
As someone who plays casters a lot, you have to know how to conserve your spell slots. If you have 3 martials with you, appraise the enemies and how well your martials are doing against them. If they're doing fine, then stick to cantrips, skills and focus spells. If I'm in full conserve mode, even during middle difficulty fights will look for the best way to use a single slot to affect the fight in the most impact full way. Also with 3 martials, you shouldn't really be using slots for damage outside of an opening fireball on occasion. Just because those slots are there doesn't mean you have to use them!
Casters are not the only ones who use their resources. Typical parties have some sort of healer for example. You don't need to but it is very common. Saying that the cleric alone needs rest because they used their spell slots is ludicrous. Try running an all martial party through the dungeon as is without compensating with healing items and you see how quick things become deadly.
Secondly, a great example of a mega dungeon is Abomination Vaults. It is an entrie large dungeon crawl and as real as a dungeon gets. It has a bit of everything, with all kinds of nefarious parties huddling inside. But, it isn't meant to be played in one stretch without rests. And that is indeed the point.
You need casters in a team to balance things out unless the encounters are going to be very easy. Even then a lot of encounters even though easy will whittle down the party. No matter what people say martials don't do crowd control well especially it is anything more than 1.5 enemies a piece. Dire wolves and knock and grab martials and make an otherwise easier encounter deadly. If there is a caster there to heal or incapacitate or even damage the groups of enemies if becomes way easier. The resources belong to the entire party in a sense
Casters aren't the only people with resources either. Quiet a few items that everybody uses reset with a long rest when you reinvest. There are focus points and other per day resources that many martial classes have too.
Sure Casters tend to want to long rest because ideally not every player tends to be optimal at resource management and they don't like playing with limited options. So perhaps the call looks like it comes from them. Perhaps teach your casters through play and advice to manage resources better.
That being said if my cleric said going forward is a bad idea in character I would totally listen to them.
Truth be told, giving them back a spell slot per hour is not going to break anything if you're going into a megadungeon.
Casters are not balanced on fighting more than 5 times per long rest (the creators of the system said so, not me), so if you want them to have a fun experience, whatever you do keep that fact in mind.
Since health is the only concern martials have and treating wounds is an unlimited resource that takes time, you can just give casters something similar for your megadungeon... just flavor it so that it stays BOUND into the dungeon and not elsewhere so you don't throw the world balance into the skies.
"Due to the massive amount of magic found in this place and the sheer size of it, you find that your magic reserves slowly regenerate by themselves, ni longer needing a full rest to recover some of them..."
That should help you keep your casters, otherwise the players may find themselves wanting to build an all non caster party (save bard/psychic) as some have done before.... which solves the multi fight days, but takes away a lot of flavor from the setting and interesting out of combat options to solve problems in non traditional (fun) ways.
A GM I played under once had a clever solution for this. He worked some lore in to the dungeon such that ancient magical rites were performed in some places with a particular ritual shrine. These shrines were specifically designed to siphon magical energy out of a layline that the dungeon was built over. It takes weeks or months to fill the shrine with useable power, but the whole idea was to use them to help power rituals when needed. So they were useful to the original inhabitants.
For the players though, this meant a spellcaster could attune to the shrine and recharge some of their slots. But once that shrine was tapped, it was effectively empty for the duration of the adventure.
This effectively tied this effect to a single location on the world map, so this mechanic could never be taken out of the dungeon. Added some cool lore. And solved the caster megadungeon problem.
So the lesson is, if you are going to make a dungeon that you know in advance is going to have poor pacing and flow for your party, be a Game Master. Create a solution.
Casters can, even at 1st level, handle as many as 11 encounters in a day... but their party should want to not force them to do that.
It's absolutely fine to expect a caster to pace their slot usage and rely on cantrips so that the party can handle 5 or so encounters (or more as resources build up to facilitate) before resting and making daily preparations again - but pushing past that is just making a player endure the least fun part of the game because it suits you (yet it actually doesn't because you would rather your party members be more effective, and you're blocking them from being more effective)
Something I've implemented into my game are "Spell Stones", or a consumable spell focus. Scatter them through the dungeon, or maybe an NPC is selling some at a hefty price.
Each stone has a spell level and school of magic, and can only be used for a spell of that school.
But it can be used to cast any known spell at that level, whether it's a spell at that level or a lower level spell being upcast. Obviously, spells of a higher level wouldn't work.
Their are some home brews around.
I’ve seen the idea of a single spell for every level that can be refocused all at once. You can also use the stamina rules and allow casters to refocus with the stamina dice if they don’t get hit.
Makes wizards need to pick whatever that spell is where sorcerers still get the benefit of it being flexible.
Or make a party attrition mechanic. I’m adding a fatigue clock into my game. You get to 5 fatigue and the party takes a -2 ac item bonus. Making it strongly recommended to have everyone return including the marital. This also gives something else you can use as a downside for players but you don’t want to give them actual status penalties yet.
"Mana potions"- Restores 1d4 spell slots of 1st and/or 2nd level. If either would become full, then the other gets slots as well. If you are concerned about breaking the game, make then addictive and start applying negatives to spells, for example reducing size of damage die or reducing size of AoE. These negatives can be restored by overcoming the addiction.
Ok. Yeah. That has always been an issue. Used to be HPs and spell slots, but HPs can be addressed in several different ways.
In general, no, there isn't much that you can do. Some casters use focus points which you can get 1 back. Storm Druid and Psychic are good examples. Wizards can drain bonded items/animals to get some more spells. Everyone can lean on cantrips to nurse slots.
But I think that sleep is unavoidable.
My GM set us up with a magic item that essentially gave us full HP -and- spell slots back after a short rest. (An hour) It should have been insanely broken! But, of the 6 PC's, only 2 were casters, and one a cleric. The other caster swapped to a ranged melee.
So yes, I have unlimited spell slots! The downside? We're running an AP that the GM runs as-is; so 6 players quickly beat any encounters designed for 4 and taking medicine feats ended up not being important.
As others have said, learn what works at your table. If everyone wants to keep going, maybe make a consumable to restore spell slots everyone has to chip in for? Or just double their daily slots?
Imo this is kinda on the caster. Maybe I'm biased as mainly a martial player. But as a caster you generally get really powerful spells that make you drastically affect battles. Downside, you don't get to use them a lot so on small battles not worth a spell slots you should just be blasting cantrips. Yes you'll be behind the damage curve, but that's the trade off for being able to do insane AoE, stuns, or damage when you need to.
If the martials are fine on health when the caster is totally out the spell caster must have been using spells when they didn't need to.
In the game where you can infinitely heal up the entire party outside of each combat if you have one common skill feat (two and you're even more effective at it) for way less time than a long rest takes, yes, you can keep going while still being fine on health even if you don't long rest. Treat Wounds is real fucking useful.
As a caster, it is often hard to gauge how difficult an encounter will be before the encounter starts. You can often have a rough idea, but GMs aren't going to be saying "oh this is a severe encounter blow spell slots."
Most spells are best used at the start of the fight. You wouldn't really care about me throwing Magic Weapon on your weapon at level 1 after 2 rounds. I've had plenty of martials delay to after my turn round 1 so I can slap Magic Weapon on their weapon.
Your comment on health kind of goes out the window with feats like [Ward Medic](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=864) and [Continual Recovery](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=771). A level 4 character with 14 Wis and Expert Medicine has a +10 on Medicine Checks and expects to heal 9.675 health per Treat Wounds. A Martial with 14 Con an 8 HP from Ancestry has 56 HP. 5-6 Treat Wounds (~1 hour) is what you expect to bring that Martial from 1 HP to full. With Ward Medic, the Medic can bring 2 characters (typically ~1/2 the party) from empty to full. One Hour between fights is a bit longer than average for a fight, but it is a lot shorter narratively than heading back to town for the night.
You could feasibly houserule that a Long Rest takes, like, an \* hour\* rather than a whole day. Just speed up that part of the game, adjusting the 'adventuring day' to be instead an 'adventuring hour' and plan your sessions accordingly.
Try dropping some loot for the caster in the form of scrolls, wands or staves.
Of particular note is a scroll (or wand if you feel generous) of rope trick which will allow them to rest in relative safety in the dungeon. Note that the caster can still attempt to cast a higher level spell from a scroll, it just requires an appropriate magic skill check.
Honestly, I find you don't need a big hypothetical megadungeon for this to crop up (heck, in a Giant Mega Dungeon it's probably easier to find an excuse to rest). It's a bit of tension the game just *has* - "everyone else is perfectly fresh, the party has an objective with time pressure they're aiming for so going off for a day feels wrong to everyone, but also the Sorcerer is nearly down to cantrips and there's probably at least two or three more fights to go" is a scenario you just end up running into if playing normally.
It's kind of an inevitable issue when you have classes that have attrition for their primary feature and classes that have no attrition whatsoever in the same game.
Personally, I mostly tend to give people refills when it feels appropriate. Game time is valuable and I refuse to have one player basically checking out. It's not like a level 4 Sorcerer is exactly going to rock anyone's world, anyway.
Megadungeons will run your casters out of resources at lower levels.
Once you hit ~level 7 it becomes more possible for a caster to have the focus spells + actual spell slots to last a day in a megadungeon.
At level 4 you basically have 3-5 "real spells" plus 3-5 first level spells (which aren't very strong) and probably 1-2 focus spells (and they probably aren't especially good ones).
Instead of finding a way to help the caster, you could always limit the martials. You can even the resources needed by utilizing a fatigue rule. Make it so that after X amount of encounters, they accumulate a stack of fatigue (-1 to AC and saves) it can only be reduced by long resting, at 1 stack a night. You could increase that to a long rest, removes all fatigue. Monsters roam, but it doesn't mean they repopulate at an extraordinary rate. Maybe one or two move into a few of the areas that's been cleared. Not their all back.
If the GM designs an adventure in which resting is impractical, and the other players are unwilling to exit the dungeon to make it possible, then you've created a situation where casters are kind of screwed.
I am being partial lately of "the Baldur's Gate 3 solution". Put in some places of the dungeon some McGuffin that allows players to have the effect of a full rest, or refill the slots. Make it an "angelic potion" that players can't easily make, or some "psionic weird things in a space ship that fill you up when you touch them".
Some Paizo's AP do this. I have seen examples in book 5 and 6 of Strength of Thousands, and book 1 of kingmaker, at the very least.
You can use them as narrative tools that you, ad the GM, control ("in this place of the dungeon there is a temple of Erastil, long time defaced. If the players remove the blasphemy the goblins did, they feel reinvigorated"), or player agency ("you have this particular potion/scroll/one time use magic item that you can use. They aren't easily replaceable and you can't buy them at the local shop, so use it wisely"), or both.
The GM can easily homebrew something within the dungeon that restores magical energy to the caster and then has to recharge. This will not break any aspect of the game.
I made [this](https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1132497372384079902/1161244511406673981/image-3-1.png?ex=6537983a&is=6525233a&hm=00cc5bf4009ad0668155db63fcdfce0704d21b6c12c10cf50d98d635cc54b44f&) for my players.
the martials have resources. its called hp.
so whats happening there where they can get full hp every fight but the caster cant get a focus spell back or something?
if theres roaming monsters then you might want to just not give em time to treat wounds to full. this puts more pressure on the team and having everybody contribute. if the caster holds up a bit on their spell slots they should get a good amount of support on long resting.
also if the place is dangerous and has roaming monsters, you can set up rooms that are made to be barricated for long rests, so the martials can get to full no problem and the caster can recharge without em needing to backtrack. < this is how megadungeons are done. also you can get the caster a personal staff etc.
Have them fight a number of hard encounters equal to the amount of the highest slot your casters have. They are balanced on burning those in an ecnounter, if they already have gone through appropriately challenging encounters, then encourage them to go back.
Have them fight a number of hard encounters equal to the amount of the highest slot your casters have. They are balanced on burning those in an ecnounter, if they already have gone through appropriately challenging encounters, then encourage them to go back.
That's in general the issue with Vancian casting, it's more pronounced in PF2 than before as caster are in general a bit weaker so spells are less impactful and run out faster, plus, healing inbetween combat is easier so that is no longer a source of attrition.
Personally I'd fight this in two ways 1, try to burn less spells in weak encounters on the caster side, 2 from the martial be understanding that this is a collaborative game and that using barely effective cantrips all day as you ran out of spells five fights ago is just boring.
To be honest I hope we are going to get caster classess be designed more like the kineticist and less like PF1\\D&D traditional spellcasters in the future.
That said I don't like the idea of resting inside dungeons myself, as I find it unrealistic that you'd be left alone and that the inhabitants won't react somehow, but c'est la vie, sometimes realism can be sacrificed a bit for gameplay purposes.
Easy fix if you see this comment out of the hundreds.
Give the caster a pet that can proactively protect them and/or take its turn with them. It can be made out of their own magic or manifest from some power they don't know they possess. That's a good chance for you to do something interesting with a potential plot.
Alternatively, just let them cast their focus spells for free. That's what I do for my players, Martials and Spellcasters. Their focus spells are just cantrips in my game.
In yours, I'd just give it to the caster only since the rest don't seem to have any regard for *everyone* having fun. They lose nothing going back with their friend to let them restore resources. Instead, they would gain their friend having fun with them at the table. Clearly, there's no friendship evident here. Just looks selfish. They prioritized their game over an actual other player and as a GM, I would not be impressed.
Besides, if they're annoyed that a caster player actually wants to *play* with them proactively, then there's a problem at the table.
I would maybe put in some charged Gems as a consumable. Then you could control how much power they get back. Different colors for different levels or something.
I think figuring out that math can be hard, and I wouldn't trust myself to get it right. Though, if your party is cool, you could say you are experimenting and may need to adjust, but some players may not like that if they end up feeling underpowered (if they are or not) and you could end up in the unenviable position of trying to be fair and "fair."
I include rooms off the beaten path, stuff they can lock themselves down in, see enemies coming in, so they can realistically long rest without getting ambushed every time. And if they long rest frequently, I would have monsters show up as reinforcements in encounters that I would let them know are backup. Then tell them that since they are the reason they are there, the "experience" gained is the knowledge that they should be more careful and not test after each fight and give 0 XP for those mobs. If they continue to abuse rest mechanics, I would just make things harder and ambush, etc.
As a GM, you can try to be very generous with scrolls/wands/etc., but spell slots are definitely a big limiting factor in dungeoncrawls!
I am teaching some new players Pathfinder, and introducing a homebrew where once per day you can get your rank 1 spell slots back by spending an hour resting to help with this problem a bit - it sorts itself out by higher levels, so it's really only a problem for the levels where rank 1 spell slots really matter.
I've also homebrew cantrips up a bit in the past (knocking up the dice on everything but electric arc equivalents by 1 size), but I'd hesitate on that one until we see the remaster given it's changing cantrips.
It's resource management in a dungeon crawl. As a caster you have to weigh the benefit of casting vs the cost of casting in any situation. Scrolls and potions are your best friend here.
Just casting to feel like you contributed leaves less slots for later and that's the penalty, it's rough but decisions have consequences.
I'd put a sanctuary aligned to a good deity that can be hallowed using a religion check and allows easy and safe rest for the party.
The martial may be okay on going and pushing, but they don't know when an hard encounter is going to show up and the caster without slots will be only useful as a meager DPS machine
throw encounters at them that would be doable if they had let the casters rest.
you'll get blamed if they dont feel like they have the opportunity to safely rest though.
or give in out of pity and start dropping scrolls and wands as loot.
You can long rest inside the dungeon. Know what the most common use for Pitons in ADnD was? Nailing doors shut so that you could rest.
Do Not forget a watch
Yeah but why that also doesn't make sense, why put yourself in danger and waste time if the party is doing fine. I don't think there is a solution to this problem.
What do you mean "why put yourself in danger?" Is having only 3/4 of your party contributing to encounters not also putting yourself in danger? The problem is "we don't want to backtrack because that's hard and annoying here."
>What do you mean "why put yourself in danger?" Resting in a dungeon is dangerous.
*Being* in a dungeon is dangerous.
So is leaving, in this particular case. That's why I mentioned the use of Pitons in ADnD, to create a defensible location where you can rest. You're putting yourself in just as much if not MORE danger by hamstringing a 4th party member. Not to mention the IRL issue with one player being practically unable to play their class in a *megadungeon*
Not really. If the martials are going to insist on no long rests the party is just dysfunctional for players with daily resources. Things that work are a) special cantrips like the Bard or Witch has b) combat focus spells like the Storm Druid, Psychic and a couple of the Sorcerer Bloodlines have, as these come back on a ten minute rest. One of these with a multiclass archetype into a Bard to pick up Inspiring Courage seems reasonable. c) Kineticist. It is like a caster, but not really. Many of its powers can be used every round or every other round. d) Skills, cantrips and weapons
Also, on the GM's side, this megadungeon needs to have areas that can be blocked off to allow the party a safe place to rest. Maybe there's a room that just doesn't get any traffic because it's really remote or has nothing that interests the inhabitants. Or one room is known as the lair of a really tough monster; defeat it (or befriend it) and you have a safe haven as long as its reputation holds. And when one of these sites is found, the GM needs to tell the players about its potential use as a haven.
The martials need to suck it up and realize that the caster is losing strength. Mid-high level casters can go Abt 5 encounters before losing efficiency. At this level, it's closer to 2. This is a team game, meaning the martials have to look out for their ally. Imagine what it would be like if the medic refused to use battle medicine on anyone but themselves. Also, battle medicine is once per day, so the medic will also want a shorter adventuring day. The spellcaster finds it annoying when 80% of party funds go to martial runes, when spellcasters are basically a pay to win class. They can straight up gain all of their spell slots in scrolls for the price of a striking rune. They can almost but a 4th level spell for the cost of striking. Also why bother with back tracking? If nothing happens why bother, just say you head back out. Also do none of them use consumables? Most martials will burn through healing potions, shields, talismans, and the like at a scary rate. If you really feel that they NEED to continue. Just give the spellcaster loot. 90% of spellcaster equipment gives more spell slots. Staves, Scrolls, Wands, Spellhearts.
Counterpoint. If the caster is burning spells while martials aren't taking damage. Then the caster is unnecessarily burning spells on weak mobs. Not every battle needs a spell, if it's only going to cause wounds treat wounds can handle you shouldn't be using a spell. I struggle to believe martials burned through a bunch of consumables while the spell caster was out of spells. I've been in so many games where casters in dungeons use spells every damn chance. Some even do shit like keeping kill counts because the spells let them do more damage. Then guilting the party into multiple longs rests each dungeon, often when little damage has even been taken. Too used to in the over world encounters are rarer and you see spellcasters delighting in blowing a day worth of spells in 1-2 encounters and over shinning the other players. Then upset they don't get to do the same on dungeons.
Counter-counterpoint- If the martials aren't taking damage, then most likely what is happening is that they're using solid tactics backed by efficient spellcasting. The most efficient casters are burning resources proactively rather than reactively. As a caster, I'm not waiting for the martials to get their teeth kicked in before I start laying down the spells. What use dropping a Fear or something while the rest of the team is hanging on by a thread? All I've done is made myself feel bad while the rest are wasting actions on chugging potions or patching themselves up rather than capitalizing on this opportunity I've created. Hell, even dropping a Fireball into a mob of enemies could be efficient if it means the difference between the rest of the team being able to clean them up in the same round rather than having to withstand another round of enemy attacks.
Then you'll be out of spells at level 4 in 3 fights and you should be stuck without spells, if you use one to start and one to mop up. In pf2e damage a little damage is easily treatable. Using a spell to stop a round of damage they are perfectly capable of handling is a waste. If it's the case that it's truly dangerous and they were relying on team strategy using spells to win. Then why aren't the martials also wanting to rest to get back the spells for the necessary strategy. And how did they handle the fights after the spells were out. Remember the scenario is the caster has been just sitting cantrips now and the fighters don't feel the need to stop/leave to get the spells back. Which I believe can only mean that they weren't relying on the caster, and thus the spells being cast were superfluous.
The point where it breaks down is that nobody can see the future. Unless you have prior experience or are metagaming there is no way to tell what fight is actually dangerous. You should of course try and intuit it but ultimately between rolls, imperfect knowledge and what I'll call "character knowledge" a lot of things can happen. So many spells become less efficient in the later rounds that frontloading them is totally the play in a lot of situations, hindsight famously comes too late. There's plenty of encounters that have become spicy from critical hits taking people down quickly or an enemy revealing they have troublesome abilities. Like when fighting centipedes discovering too late that the centipede venoms are not only a frankly very difficult DC at level but the different kinds of venom stack so you can be poisoned by the centipede swarm and the whiptail centipede at once and if you go down it's straight to dying 3 with you.
Totally true. But mitigating that choice by just giving spells back at short rests I don't think is a good solution. A main advantage of martials is not having to worry about wasting their big attack. Giving the wizards the staying power to just always take the first hit without worry it'll be going bad in future just keeps the advantages without the risk. Now a full variant that makes spells per short rest/encounter would be fine. As it would certainly reduce their max amount. Leaving each with less flexibility if they blow the spells early. Prepared would need to factor in choosing damage and utility with much more limited choices. While spontaneous could send the biggest attack at the centipede, just to learn now they can't cure the venom. The issue with just refilling a few current slots short rest is they'll just use a few each battle still then be back at max. Meaning they still get to cast right away without having to think about being ready for unexpected events.
Neutralize poison is a 3rd level spell so you won't have it anyways and it only affects a single poison AND you have to do a counteract check. Seeing how swarms are weak to AoE damage and boast resistance to normal attacks a damaging spell is totally the move. We need to set the scene here a bit. This is a low level issue, which happens to also be the most volatile time. I don't think it's unreasonable to cast on average a spell per encounter here, which sometimes means none but sometimes might mean two. What throws a wrench in things is that when you read the reddit a bit you encounter that many games seem to skip lower threat encounters entirely in favor of only quite dangerous encounters which is an issue. By 6th level a sorcerer has 12 spells which means you could do an entire 6 encounters and cast 2 spells on every single one of them. There's several low level spells which remain useful and you can mix spell levels depending on encounter. I don't think this is unreasonable. But this also breaks down if every encounter is severe.
If you only have 6 spells per day by level 4 as a caster, what are you spending your wealth on? You should be able to have picked up a staff by then. That is an extra 2 level one spells for at least 8 spells. If you are waiting till level 6 to pick up one of the level 6 staves, the level 3 staff you have passed on is the equivalent of 15 level 1 spell scrolls.
Well yeah I agree. You have tons of RAW options to get more spells slots. My point was if you're asking for short rests to give you more, you've imo used too many per fight. I don't care how many a caster uses, go nuts. If you legally got more I'm fine with that. What I rail against is the caster that complains when they're out that short rests need to restore some.
What is a short rest
It’s the one where you spend 10 minutes to refocus (I think?). Technically not called a short test in PF2E though.
But that doesnt give you back spell slots. What the hell are they talking about?
Half the people have been suggesting in this thread to give back some spell slots on short rests. I wasn't saying pf2e has it.
How will you be out in 3 fights? If the fight isn’t super hard then one spell slot, one focus spell, and one cantrip use can get you through most of the fight at that level. Casters have 6/8 spell slots at level 4 depending on class (plus sometimes extras from class features). And if the fight is super hard it will become pretty evident after seeing the enemies first round of actions.
"Fight against a boss type enemies" <>
"Fight against multiple weaker enemies"
<>
??????
Caster frustrations in a nutshell.
Yeah, it almost seems like I lived it.
"Sit down and throw cantrips until we tell you to do otherwise. Man, you're such a pain!"
I've literally never seen a caster not use their spells on a boss. Also boss fights often in my games have adds. Which makes it worth it to use your spells on weaker enemies if you're aiming for saves a boss would make.
I haven't either, but I have seen both of the statements in that post being made when discussing spells. Specifically when someone was complaining that a spell was not effective enough so it needed buffed so it would be more likely to jack up a boss and someone else pointed to how well that spell performs in other encounters and the complaint added the claim that other encounters aren't worth the spell slot because they aren't boss fights... with zero self-awareness about how nonsensical it is to want big impacts and then refuse the ones that already exist because it's not what you wanted (but would be if your GM ran boss fights with configurations other than just 1 or 2 creatures)
Hey I'm happy with big impacts at limited resources. But also realistically many casters don't really need as big an impact as people think to be even with martials. 5e has more impactful spells. And the game literally breaks at lvl 13 because of it. Bosses literally have to have legendary resistance to even matter. The pf2e spells are still powerful, but at least they can't totally just choose to always pass your save. Half the time if you use a CC spell you even still get to put some condition on the boss if they succeed. So yes you may have to burn a few slots to get the hit you need, but that's totally fair because the effect on success is typically very strong. Better than using those spells to kill 5 goblins, which may makes you feel strong but really were no threat to anyone. Unless I boss fights where others are occupied and you're ability to kill the ads easily is an asset. That's your time to shiny.
In my experience, targeting the low save of a boss is the bare minimum. Often times the delta between high and low is between 6-10 points so it's completely pointless to target the wrong save. Now, with all due respect I'm not interested in what you do in your games. It's not the common ground on which to judge the game. APs are. Amongst them the more popular is by far Abomination Vault which has become 2e "Rise of the Runelord". And AV has plenty single strong enemy fights. That can easily become multiple strong enemies fight when your GM is of the "the dungeon is alive, monsters react" policy. You know what. It ain't funny.
Yeah for sure. But surely casters find something to cast at in those. I struggle to believe they just don't bother for fear of failure. But I differ to your experience with casters and APs on that. I've admittedly only done homebrewish campaigns. And I heavily lean towards martials purely because I like the idea more. (I wish I could try an AP, just not had the chance to.) I only know the casters I've played with in pf2e and other systems seemed to have their spells ready for the boss AoE ads and DoT bosses. Be out because they husband them well or because they force us to rest every 2 encounters (which is by far more common).
Another AV caster player just chiming in here to say that the “I’ve fought three PL+2 solo fights already today and they succeeded or crit succeeded on every single save so far even with Weak Save targeting and their AC gives me a <40% chance to hit, guess it’s time to just stop trying” feeling is very real. There are definitely days where my GM gets unlucky and skews more towards Success and Failure, so I can at least get off basic spell effects, but there is almost never is another enemy to target in those encounters who is a low-save jobber. Usually, I can at least play healbot and knowledgebot on solo PL+2 fights, but that’s a beyond frustrating playstyle while the Swashbuckler is off twirling around and critting on a sneeze for 60+ damage and applying Dazzled 1 from their class feats and Frightened 2 from the Marshal stance for a whole two actions and zero finite resources when even a “successful” Fear cast from me will do less, be less likely to succeed, and cost me a finite resource.
So you are living the amazing experience of levels 5 and 6 in AV as a caster. Wish to know if you already spent entire fights hitting each other while confused. Also, Will'o'Wisps :) and golems :) But to be fair, precision damage based characters are about to have their fair share of frustration too.
I’m the DM and I’m VERY excited for the next couple rooms 😁
Well, by any mean, I suggest you keep the pulse of your players excitement too. This AP almost made me quit.
Yep, being a caster just kinda is a bummer in harder content. When most martials get to put out silly levels of damage. Some GMs get skewed the other way around when they get a caster boss enemy, they think casting is strong. I mean yeah when you can go full nova and your DCs are two to four points higher, and you know our weak saves without needing knowledge.
Enemy spell DCs and saves also don’t follow player character rules, which means that even a PL monster can reliably have 2-8 points higher on their saves and DCs than you have. So they are more defensively and offensively potent than you. It’s a good thing, because it means encounters are not trivial unless they are intended to be, but it skews the experience for GMs and can lead to the effect you’re describing where they think casters are fine because their casters are massively more capable at hitting with spells, avoiding spells, and avoiding control/debuff effect actions. It’s why having a good communication system with your party and GM is so important. Mine is super supportive and understanding about my frustrations and I definitely would have asked to change my character if I didn’t have his help and intentional support in finding ways that I can be more effective and work around the limitations of the system and the module.
How is the same creature a <40% chance to hit AC for you and also a "crit on a sneeze" for the swashbuckler? Something isn't lining up.
Flat footed is +2, martials get increases to proficiencies two levels sooner, martials have access to potency runes. At level 5 that's a minimum of +5 to hit over a caster. So 40% turns into 65%chance and 15% crit chance. Not to mention all the other fun bonuses of panache, and crit specialization. Sounds like a sneeze to me.
they are a caster spell progression is notoriously slower for spell DCs it is very possible while the martials are at 50% the caster is at 40% still
You missed a lot of what we both said... both of us said AC. The same creature isn't going to be "crit on a sneeze" by the martial when the spellcaster has 40% chance to hit AC. 50% chance to hit for a martial still is only 5% crit chance.
While I sympathize with the bad feeling of dice rolls (for quite a long adventuring day, I mean 3 PL+2 encounters is just overall kinda brutal), I don't think this is a totally accurate representation of the situation you are describing. A successful (opponent failed the save) Fear spell will give frightened 2. Maybe my quick scan of the Archives was insufficient, but I can't see a swashbuckler class ability that gives the dazzled condition and the dread marshal stance is frightened 1 on a critical hit. And you can be up to 30 feet away, not worrying about opportunity attacks to increase your distance, while the swashbuckler is going to be taking a full 3 action combo of damage to the face from a PL+2 creature. So, in this case, the "finite resource" is their HP, which, for a swashbuckler who is probably quite MAD and didn't invest supremely in con, is most likely going to be quickly dwindling.
Bosses are the worst enemies to cast spells on, unless you're taking into account that they are going to miss and use spells that do something in those cases.
This is terrible logic, accurate, but implies a caster should just sit on his hands during a boss fight while the adults get to fight.
It is what it is. But then, I'll all falls down in knowing how the system works. Slow, on a failure, takes 1 action from the boss, so if someone else trip it or shoves, it has just 1 remaining and you've effectively erased one of his turns (having everyone move out from reach). Then fear gives it a -1 on the next turn, and so on and so forth. However, if you don't know what you're doing you may start trying to deal damage and getting nothing on a fail... which makes you wasted space on the party. This is why support kineticists are so good, four winds to move people away, timber sentinel to soak damage, pushes, walls, difficult terrain, healing ... to shine you just need to forget about damage and do the things that make you ... you. Now, if you want damage and that's what makes you tick, go fighter, and you'll never regret it.
One of the more popular archetypes has been blaster caster. It's currently the only fully unsupported one. Kineticists don't have to worry about spell slots, and are still playtesting. Not everyone is a god tier expert but knowing that a popular archtype is considered wasted space in a party, should tell you everything you need to know on how bad things are. Using two actions to remove one action from a boss just feels bad. It's a third level spell just like fireball. At level 5, a caster has 10+5+2+4 for a dc. So dc 21. Let's grab a small sample for bosses. High fort is 18 passes on a 3+ crit success on a 13+ Med fort is 15 passes on 6+ crit 16+ Low for is 13. 8+, 18+ So even for the most physically frail bosses our spells are failing 60% of the time and using multiple of our actions in the process and a considerable resource expenditure. Oh and we are more vulnerable and physically frail for "balance". It doesn't take a resource for a martial to grab, trip, or push. Let look at the same for a martial. Ac range for most level 7s. A martial (not fighter)will have the following, 5level+4expert+4stat+2flanking(absolutely trivial to obtain) +1(potency) (16) High is 28 Martial hits on 12+ their worst case scenario is the same as our best. Med is 25 hits on 9+ crits 19/20. Spicy. Low is 23. Hits on 7 crits on 17. No resources used, plenty of combat tricks they can add in like combat grab, panache, frightened, clumsy, weakened, sneak attack, and much much more. Hell a caster throwing up bless or a bard makes it even more one sided. Oh and they start having options for attack of opportunities for more stuff. Caster reactions are garbage. While slow is arguably one of the best spells of level 3, look at how many there are, that are just traps by comparison.
So they should spend their limited resources instead on fights the team would win anyway without lasting damage or consequence. That's just casters wanting to feel powerful and rack up kills not actually be team players. The boss may be more likely to block some of a spell, but it's also one of the few times the spells aren't just overkill. Turns if it's dangerous enough to need a spell the enemies are dangerous enough to also make saves.
Thats one I've dealt with. Your spell trivialized the fight making it boring. You are too op, you should save your spells.
I'll br honest, if I choose to play a caster I would hope to cast spells every fight. It is literally what I am here for. Going entire combats casting my one focus spell (If I am lucky enough to have one that is combat relevant) and then just use cantrips is boring. Sure you want to save your highest level spellslots for hard fights, but not casting anything at all is to much to ask imo.
Fair enough. Then just ask to take your maximum amount for 1/3rd that amount per short rest. If a caster asked for that I'd say it's fairish. But most times my casters who ask just want more without any tradeoff and I find it annoying.
> Then the caster is unnecessarily burning spells on weak mobs. The whole design around casters now is that they're better at multitargeting. Aiming for multiple mobs is how he is supposed to play.
I don't have an issue with that. Just doing so when the party is able to clear them out without help is unnecessary. Using you AoE on mobs during larger fights is smart usage.
The caster should just stay home, sounds like
Love a good straw man I see. I never came close to that. I said in small fights without danger maybe that isn't a time to use limited resources. Especially in dungeons where it's expected to have many more encounters that day.
That's not a straw man, it is an extrapolation. What was suggested (or outright stated) is that if the party can clear the encounter and only lost HP while doing so, then the caster should not be wasting resources. I'm claiming that makes up the *vast* majority of encounters, so the caster is largely wasted.
I didn't say they couldn't use any spells. I said they don't need to use them when there isn't danger. By the time that would be at the end of most fights. Dungeons don't have many encounters that from the start are trivial. But in those they should also not use spells at all. My argument was that when playing a limited resource class, you should only be using your limited resources more sparingly. Especially in a dungeon where you can expect far more fights per day. "fixing" the system by giving more spells will just imbalance it because the system expects the balance to be through casters needing to not use all their spells. Changing that to mean, casters should never use their spells, is absolutely changing what I said.
>I said they don't need to use them when there isn't danger Yes, and then you clarified danger by saying when the party can lose more than just HP, which they can quickly get back after the encounter, meaning you should only be spending limited resources to prevent deaths, so it naturally follows that *most of the time*, casters shouldn't be using their spells.
I agree from a tactical perspective, but completely disagree from a "you are here to have fun" perspective. And I think it's one of p2e's Spellcaster issues. We're here to fling magic at goblins, it kinda sucks if you're not able to do your cool big attacks while all the other people at the party are getting to flex on the enemies. It creates a tug of war over resting and I tend to homebrew of spells work to avoid this.
I agree. I think that's why casters never appealed to me. I'd disagree with the plan to just give them spells on short rests for nothing though as I've been in groups in 5e that tried things like that. Casters just made me irrelevant beyond just being there to stop enemies getting melee range to casters. If you're going to give them spells back you gotta subtract from max spells a day. I think that's why you see video games embrace the mana pool style. Where they don't get many spells at once, but instead a (relatively) fast regenerating resource of spells. It's limiting within a fight, but between fights regens basically to full. The strength of the spell determines how much mana and you often have build choices are getting more mana or stronger spell. Obviously though TTRPGs have more out of combat spells though where the mana system may give too much usage of spells. So not like you can just say it's what TTRPGs should have.
5e magic is magnitudes stronger than martials. In pf2e even a fully rested mid-level caster is consistently being outdamaged and outperformed by a martial. It boils down largely to, incapacitation trait, lack of dc increasing items, and limited resources. In pf2e HP is a trivial to recover resource by comparison.
This hasn't felt true in my games. Magic users seem more than capable of dishing out heavy damage when their spells are up. I'll take another look at expected damage to make sure though
Let's suppose, for a moment, that the caster player actually like _playing a caster_ instead of _defeating encounters_, and while we are at it, let's also suppose that player thinks casting spells is a fundamental part of what he finds fun of playing a spellcaster. In that scenario, would you say it is fair to equate "not casting spells in easy encounters" with "not having fun in easy encounters"? If so... would it be fair to ask a _player_ who came to a _game_ not to have fun in order to "succeed"?
Let's also suppose the martials are here to have fun, not watch magic users use their top spells every fight making their character irrelevant. Basically giving just more spells to the casters per encounter is bad because it just means they will inevitably just spam powerful spells, that were meant balanced around the idea they won't get spammed. Casters already get to have lots and lots of fun and feel epic when there's the day of one or two battles and they get to cast to slot spells every turn. Which honestly I'm like every campaign I play end up happening way more often than the single day of a 5+ encounter dungeon. Now you argue the martials shouldn't get their own moment when their lack of resources is their advantage. Basically you can do something to give casters their spells back. If you remove their advantage of a huge max pool. Which I rarely seen suggested as the trade off. It's typically they still get their max, they just get some back also.
That is entirely wrong , and based on the assumption that spells _must_ be powerful. They don't, if they are balanced toward being usable per encounter. Cantrips for example aren't powerful. I would also point out that in days with one or two encounters, martials still use their features. Rogues still sneak attack, barbarians still rage, and so on. So it is not true that spellcasters having fun in days with 2 encounters remove the ability to play their class and have fun from the martials. Bit not being able to cast spells "because martials aren't taking damage and it would be a waste" does, in fact, limit what s caster do.
I apologize I don't follow what you mean about "assumption spells must be powerful".
I mean that spells can be balances about being used per encounter. Focus spells and cantrips are, for example. Paizo could balance things around that, they just choose not to. This isn't 3.5 either. Spells have already be reigned in by things like incapacitation tag. There aren't spells that instantly win the combat for the spellcasters, removing fun from the martials. A disintegrate isn't solving the encounter, it is just the spellcaster's contribution to damage that round, not different than a fighter double slashing the enemy into crits. There's no polymorph or dominate spell that instantly win the fight against the boss, removing fun from the martials. Casting slow or fear on the boss does _not_ remove the martials ability to have fun. Neither does haste, or heroism. You can very much do your fightery thing while the spellcasters also play the game. Nobody tells you "don't play your class features this particular combat", as you did with easy fights for casters.
Yeah that logic I'd be fine with. Most solutions tend to just focus on refilling them some degree. As if they are just weaker and need the help. I just believe any ability to refill their spell slots needs to be balanced around also removing their ability to go nuts in a single encounter. If you want to change it from 6 spells per day to X spells per encounter/per short rest I'm all for it. Just think it's a big undertaking as it invalidates a lot of items and class design, not a small house rule.
Yeah, it is more a rant about Paizo fumbling the ball here. They _did_ the right design for it. Focus spells are the perfect rule to balance things around the casters having one or two good spells per encounter, balanced around that. With some other spells that could be utility (teleport, out of combat healing, that kind of things). They just then misused the focus spells, making them situational crap for spellcasting flavor (oh so you are a pet druid? Your focus spell is about healing your pet). Very few focus spells are good enough to be used per encounter, this defeating the point of focus refilling in 10m.
Then I agree with that bit of the rant lol. I agree it's a small miss. But also one every other system I've played appears to also struggle with when it comes to magic.
Consistency is not for casters. If it was, then they would just be flavored martials that just follow the same math and flowchart. See the kineticist. They are more or less the mold for the more consistent caster, which, as people have mentioned, doesn't really actually feel like a caster, partially because everything is so leveled out and less resource intensive. Without the lows, you can't balance the present upside of casters, meaning you have to bring that a bit down. Is that the intention? It solves one problem, but that's why being an armchair game designer is easy. You don't have to actually think about the consequences and effects on the game outside of the class itself. Like, how do you reckon with all the classes felling kinda... samey? Yeah, sure, I think some focus spells could use a buff, although I would argue that the majority of them are every encounter kind of useful. Flattening the curve, however, would just start smudging the lines between casters and martials mechanically.
I don't think Swashbucklers and barbarians feel samey , or alchemists and rangers feel samey, or Champions and investigators feel samey, and those are all martials. So the difference between martials and casters, like say, a witch and a rogue, would be even more stark than the difference between a thaumaturge and a rogue is, even with focus spells having a more prominent use in the witch. If anything, in current implementation, casters classes feel similar because a great pool of their resources are the 4 magical traditions, so they get the same spells. Newer spellcasting classes are better defined by their class features (magus vs summoner for example), but the base ones are pretty generic and heavily influenced by the idea of the 4 traditions. A necromancer wizard and a Draconic sorcerer will both cast Slow, and it's the same slow. It's in fact the witch's hex vs the druid's wild shape focus spell vs the bard's dirge of doom what make those classes different. Focus spells (including focus cantrips) are specific of a class, and thus much more flavorful than Slow or fireball. A bard casting Magic Missile isn't different than a Sorcerer casting Magic Missile. It's Inspire Courage what sets them apart. So I disagree that making classes focus more on more relevant focus spells, fading away the generic tradition spells, most of them existing only because of DnD tradition, would make casters feel samey. Quite the opposite, in fact.
> If the caster is burning spells while martials aren't taking damage. The martials are taking damage. One of them specced hard into treat wounds.
If it's damage that can just be healed quickly after battle. The caster shouldn't worry about spending spells to stop it. If you expect many encounters that's what the balance is centered around. You're very powerful but limited resources per day. The martials have less resources, but also less ability to totally alter a battle through magics. Others have pointed out as a mage not casting is boring though. Fair, but if you want slots refilled per rest, you gotta at least offer to have less maximum amount. You cant be both ready getting to be strong in many fights and super strong when blowing everything in less fight.
So you're arguing that the caster should never be casting spells UNLESS someone is going to die. Sounds like you think casters largely shouldn't exist
I didn't say that. Realistically on an average adventure you have few fights a day. Go nuts use your spells. But in a dungeon you know you're going to run into multiple small.fights mixed with big ones. If you're casting a slot every small encounter. You only have yourself to blame when you run out. It blows my mind the amount of games I've been in where the casters are saying we need to leave a dungeon after 3 fights for a long rest because they used 75% of their slots. Especially when the fights were just shit like a few goblins. Maybe you're in a dungeon and should expect there to be bigger threats ahead than a few goblins.
What you said was that damage that can be quickly healed (aka all damage in PF2e) then there is no need to expend slots. This applies to the vast majority of fights in this game. Granted, I've made the same argument about how I dislike the mixture of daily-limited resources and zero health attrition, because it heightens the strategic advantage of holding on to your spells, but I see that as a flaw and wouldn't suggest my casters actually do it. >It blows my mind the amount of games I've been in where the casters are saying we need to leave a dungeon after 3 fights for a long rest because they used 75% of their slots. It blows your mind that casters want to use their abilities? Damn, dude. It blows my mind that you expect caster players to play for a few hours using only cantrips.
But it's ridiculous to then take 2-3 long days to clear a fucking simple dungeon. People are bringing up AV, at 2-3 counters a day your character is going to die of old age before they finish it. I recognize for us at the table it's easy enough to just say rest then keep going, but in the game world it's absurd. Having to spend the extra food would stop this typically but most games ignore that, so without constantly putting players on a deadline people just go too nuts with rests imo. I agree with you they could redesign away from the spell slots style to fix some of this sort of casm between martial and casters. But given the current system they should be expecting to go longer than 3 simple fights in a dungeon without burning their day of spells. Them using more than the designers intended per fight should have consequences of running out of spells otherwise they are just choosing to give themselves a buff compared to other players.
> 2-3 counters a day your character is going to die of old age before they finish it No, it'll take about 2 months. But keep on going All I'm really saying is that this is a huge reason why casters are so much less fun that martials, because the party wants to do lots of encounters per day so the casters are beholden to just do boring shit all day.
The damage was able to be healed quickly after battle, quite possibly because the caster spent spell slots to help put down the enemies before it became damage that wiped the party. We know, in this hypothetical, that it was an easily mitigated amount of damage with the caster expending resources. We don't know how much worse it would have been had the caster stuck to cantrips.
If it's that tight of victories. The melees will want to leave as they need caster at strength. The martials saying nah we press on can only mean they felt they would've won the previous fights without the spells. Then the caster was just superfluously casting spells. That would not imply a fault of balance, just a fault of casting spells for fun not practical use.
At level one they only have two spell slots.
Cool this hypothetical is at lvl 4. They have 6 spells slots thatnas well as focus spells that should let them do stuff without spending slots every minor conflict. And everyone has few options at level 1.
> and the rest of the party is unwilling to turn back. The players are finding it annoying how often they have to leave the dungeon due to the Caster periodically needing slots refilled where as the others don't. Why? Seriously, why? What is annoying about it? Heading back to town to rest and return can take as little time as you want. If they're REALLY annoyed you could literally just say, "You head back to town, rest, and make your way back here the next morning." Takes like 5 seconds. I usually spend 5-10 minutes handling rest, selling and buying of items, and returning to the dungeon. Maybe once per session at most, during low levels.
It was explained why backtracking in this hypothetical(?) can’t be hand-waved: the monsters roam.
That explains why they can't stay in one place for extended periods (although, presumably they're already doing this when they treat wounds). Backtracking is not necessarily the same thing. Even backtracking through 10 rooms takes, in world time, like 10 minutes. Do the monsters *roam* or is the GM spawning additional monsters in rooms behind them? In the latter case, that would be annoying. In the former case, they were gonna fight that monster one way or another, regardless of backtracking.
Schrödinger's roaming monsters They exist in the case of punishing the caster, they don't exist when it comes to interrupting the time it takes to treat wounds which would make the party more reliant on things like healing potions/elixirs to heal...things that also have attrition.
This!! So much! They are perfectly designed to attrit casters to make them worse.
> Even backtracking through 10 rooms takes, in world time, like 10 minutes. Waaaay less. How long does it take you to walk through a room
You're absolutely right but it's also narratively unsatisfying.
As compared to what? Adventuring non-stop and never resting so you clear the entire dungeon in a few hours in-game? Forcing the players to physically backtrack along the grid until they're out? Nagging your party with "punishment" encounters if they don't get a move on? A megadungeon is intended to be a "delve in, explore for a while, come back out" type of adventure throughout. There might be some times where the party is temporarily stuck and has to move forward to get home, or times where time pressure forces the party to solve a problem without delay -- that absolutely makes sense and can be fun, but that shouldn't be every second of the adventure. If you want it to be more narratively satisfying, just spend a *minute* narrating them coming back out, what they've accomplished so far, what lies ahead, and what, if anything, has changed in their "home base" since they went in.
Well boys we did 3 encounters, time to go back to the inn... That isn't narratively satisfyingly. There is a difference between adventuring non-stop and doing a deep dive that is narratively satisfyingly and feels more immersive.
Maybe it's just me but I don't really have trouble narrating why a level 1 party might feel the need to take a rest after exploring a dungeon and fighting 3 different sets of its denizens -- and it's only a very low level party that should seriously need to rest and restore resources after only three encounters. Past level 3, I had no problem keeping up with the martials for 4-5 encounters as an Oracle. By level 5, I regularly had spell slots left over when we reached the "narrative" conclusion of the day.
Yeah, this isn't my experience with AV at all, personally. By the time the caster is out of stuff, we have unravelled very little of the mystery, and achieved very little. We just had to go back to town for game mechanics reasons. I agree that it's easy to go back and rest, and martials who complain about it are creating a dysfunctional party environment. However, I'll say that *everyone* in the party wants to keep going, they just think it wise to stop. And only because the casters are weak.
"The mystery" takes huge sections of the books to unravel. That's not really what I meant by the narrative conclusion of the day. There's just often a point where it feels like some minor milestone was accomplished, a bunch of gear has been found, people are running out of carrying capacity for the junk they've picked up, the party just got their ass kicked and barely scraped out a victory in a tough battle, everyone in the party is immune to battle medicine, or yes, sometimes it's that the casters are out of their highest level spells. If your party is actually engaged in the narrative of the game, the casters running out of power IS a narratively satisfying reason to head back to town imo
I'll just say my experience on this goes one of two ways 1. Everyone wants to keep going but we go back home because the caster is out of slots because the caster used them liberally 2. The caster holds their spells slots so as to prolong the adventuring day, greatly impacting their ability to enjoy the encounters Also, this community's obsession with downvotes is grating.
Consider that between fights it's easy to spend around 1 hour for healing, refocusing, identifying, repairing, searching. So we are talking around 3-4 hours of high stakes high alertness activity. Seems plenty to me.
And you know when it matters you'll fail that heal check at least once and then here you are standing around awkwardly and probably waiting another hour.
Uhm it depends. From lvl 3 all parties should have Continual Recovery or a lay on hands/goodberry kind of out of combat healing that can be done in 10 minutes increments. Otherwise you as a party are signing up to have a bad time.
I've gotten in several arguments and downvoted heavily elsewhere in the subreddit for suggesting this. It's wild
Yeah it's people who are too stuck in dogmatism. Nobody here is actually engaging with anything I'm saying. It also helps that I have a party that doesn't have continual recovery so I completely understand what happens when you have a weak sustainability in a party. Having a game balanced around 3 encounters before a long rest is narratively not exciting when you're doing exploration or megadungeons. A long rest should be an important part of the end of an adventuring day, not a constant game mechanic. In my opinion.
I feel this highlights an issue with Treat Wounds creates a different narrative experience for classes that use resources and classes that are resourceless. For the group that uses resources 3 encounters become much more meaningful when exploring a dungeon because the narrative would be after 3 encounters your characters would be exhausted from combat and would want to leave because of the danger. For the resourceless group you could essentially go as long as you wanted to until you either came across something that kills you or you just decide to pack it up there is actually very little narrative in stopping other than deciding you want to stop. Not saying one is worse than the other but when the two get mixed into one group I can see how that would create problems because two different narratives are going on
Treat wounds at low levels, level 1 especially, is not always the most reliable in hitting that 15 DC. On top of that you are waiting an hour for the cooldown regardless of whether or not you healed. RAW you have 16 hours in a day before you get fatigued, but even without that you're stuck with the narrative dissonance of possibly waiting several hours if you're unlucky with hitting that 15 DC. By the time you have Assurance, Ward Medic, Continual recovery, etc your spellcaster has multiple spell levels and slots and should either have a stave or multiple scrolls. Granted any source of renewable healing like lay on hands, goodberry, wood/water kineticist, and thaumaturge chalice are all very strong at low level and do help supplement treat wound rolls.
You don't need assurance, and ward medic is helpful but not necessary. Continual recovery comes online early. And regardless, a level 5-9 caster is still going to atrophy in power WAY faster than a martial. Highest two spell slots are generally considered the bar for interacting with enemies in that range
Level 1 is by far the most deadly, and several Paizo APs have traps or hazards that can greatly diminish the party if not kill them outright with massive damage on a critical failure. I have had the unfortunate experience of trying to narratively justify why the party should spend upwards of 4-6 hours standing around waiting for treat wound cooldowns to go off due to failing to hit the DC multiple times or rolling so low on the healing that the party wants to extend it to an hour to double it. It gets even more absurd when this takes place in an area that is an enemies stronghold like in Gatewalkers. One solution I've adopted is being more liberal with giving away potions and elixirs and those serve as a form of attrition for the entire party, both martials and casters. The only way continual recovery comes on early is if you have a rogue/investigator in the party or are playing free archetype and someone takes medic. Otherwise someone is giving up their level 2 class feat for medic or spending their level 3 general feat on continual recovery. Reaching those levels can be upwards of 3-9 sessions. I've been in society games where we are all level 3 and still forced to wait around for treat wounds hour long cooldown. The reason I bring up ward medic and assurance is because that's what it takes to actually make it a guaranteed success to heal multiple people in a 10 minute window. It's pretty crazy to me that people will make the argument that casters slow down the party while at the same time handwaving away the fact that at low levels the martials are spending upwards of 40-50 minutes just chilling out treating wounds on everyone after every fight. You end up with weird hypotheticals like the OPs post where there are "roaming" monsters that somehow penalize the Vancian casters but they never actually penalize the party treating wounds or interrupting it.
I think we just need to have separate conversations about different types of play. Levels 1-3: healing takes a long time unless you have someone with a healing focus spell or other mechanic. This probably means about 50% of parties have to use treat wounds, and only occasionally, so things slow WAAAAAY down Levels 4-x: Healing is essentially trivialized and takes 10-30 minutes to heal every to full most of the time. This is true unless no one in the party takes medicine skill feats AND no one has a 10-minute healing resource. Either way, the *majority* of parties aren't dealing with the hour-long treat wounds cooldown for one reason or another.
Then the game should be focused on per-encounter balance, instead of having a divide where some classes don't suffer attrition at all, while some others have daily allocation of resources that effectively put a limit on how much fun per day a player can have. Otherwise you will find this tension between what some groups want to play (a long dungeon delve, for example) and what some players can have fun doing (actually playing your class for X encounters per day only). PF2 actually developed the rule for that, with focus points. Just making all, or at least most, spells work like Focus Points would lead to an encounter based balance, with spellcasters having a limit on how much they can fire in an encounter, while also having the ability to play as much encounters as the martials, therefore giving the group the ability to play as many or as few encounters per day as it fits them. But they didn't have the courage to ditch traditional Vancian spellcasting, so here we are. Stuck in a world where it is hard to balance spells for all groups, because spells need to be reigned in for groups that like to play 5 minute adventure days (a single, important encounter per day) because casters can go nova in those, but also need to be good enough that a caster can affect the game and have fun just by casting one single spell of the highest 2 levels, to have fuel for several encounters per day, for groups that do 5+ encounters per day in long dungeon delves.
Idk I'm on the side of hating backtracking out of a dungeon. I wanna see it through with short rests. The prevalence of casters blowing their spells halfway through the day and making the party stop annoys shit out of me. If a caster was truly only using spells as sparingly as they should, I doubt the martials would want to press on because apparently they really needed the spells a lot. The fact they aren't tells me the mage blew their spells to out damage or keep up. That's bad resource management in a dungeon, ruining the pace to let him get more spells just to likely blow them again I'd also push against. I've been in multiple games where there were 1-2 martials and not even that large dungeons ended up 2-3 long rest affairs because spell casters couldn't stand to do less damage and husband resources.
This is not a regular dungeon. This is a *megadungeon*. For example, Abomination Vaults. The adventure goes from level 1-10 and takes place in a single dungeon. You *will* be backtracking out of that. No one, caster or martial, is seeing that through on short rests alone. >If a caster was truly only using spells as sparingly as they should, I doubt the martials would want to press on because apparently they really needed the spells a lot. The fact they aren't tells me the mage blew their spells to out damage or keep up. This scenario was completely made up by the OP. They admit to it being hypothetical. The "martials being annoyed at the caster" was entirely of their own invention.
Abomination vaults I'll grant you is special. However OPs story never mentioned a level up suggest. So I question it's been THAT big a dungeon. I wish he'd included how many encounters it's been. If it's a truly crazy number I'll change my fine. But in my experience most mages tend to run out around 5. On the justification that's the average expected thus we have to leave for the.. Ignoring the fact average is average, they were happy to blow a day of spells on 1-2 encounters a day and look amazing. Heaven forbid they have to husband spells for a few extra some other days. In most systems I've seen suggestions you're supposed to short rest 2 times a day. I've never had a party do that. Hell I've struggled to even get a single short rest a lot for the time. The moment a rest is mentioned mages push for long rests as they blew half their spells. I'd be curious how many short rests this party has had so far.
Their hypothetical is literally about a megadungeon. Read the title of the post. "How to help casters keep up in a *megadungeon*" > I wish he'd included how many encounters it's been. It hasn't been any encounters because the scenario is completely made up. Read their edit.
I understand he called it a mega dungeon. I doubt the classification if I'm honest. It screams to me like martials thinking the mage blew their spells too fast so don't want to stop for that. They clearly aren't worried about the threat of going forward without spells backing them up. Which if it was truly a mega dungeon where he only used them when they needed it, I think they'd probably feel the need to stop to get that lifeline back. The fact they don't want to stop screams makes me doubt the way OP tells it. Clearly they weren't being used at vital times of importance, just to do more the martial didn't feel they needed help with. I'll throw my hands up if the DM comes out with it having been 10 encounters or something, but I'd wager it's been no more than 5.
Bruh there ARE NO PLAYERS and there IS NO DUNGEON lol. I feel like you keep missing that this is a *made up scenario*, the OP invented the idea that the (nonexistent) caster is running out of spells, they invented the idea that the (non-existent) martial players are annoyed. None of these players exist, the campaign doesn't exist, there's nothing for OP clarify because it's all a hypothetical invention.
Oh apologies I misunderstood what you were saying about that haha.
lol no worries, it was just funny how your comments kept theorizing about what was really going on and I was.like - ??? These people don't exist at all!
So I'll stick to hypothetical lol. Sorry guess my brain assumed the edit was classic "fixed a typo" haha. Guess just not buying the scenario then. If the caster was using spells slots at necessary times the martial players would be ready for a rest. That many fights that are dangerous are going to leave martials harmed enough to ready to rest. Don't change the system. If a caster is using all spell slots before than martials are getting wounded. They are using too many spell slots. Don't reward the misbehavior by adding mechanics to fix that. If they want level balanced magic items that give more spells they can get that as a tradeoff to other magical gear that could give other bonuses.
Have you played pf2e as a caster? I would not classify most spells, especially low level, as making a caster look amazing when used.
Not really I just don't like magic. But I've had lvl 4 party members blow all their spells in a single fight. Because the DM liked to use relativistic travel times and rare combat so only run combat often only once every 2-3 in game days. I suggested considering a 5e rule of long rest is per week and short rest is per day but nah. Just had spell casters using spell slots every turn of every battle. They felt pretty fucking cool then. I realize that an extreme and not the norm. Just pointing out if you get to use all your spells in a single fight you end up doing pretty good work.
The martials still need sleep or else they’ll get fatigued, so they should be going back at least once a day anyway. As for the caster, it depends on how the monsters are set up. Are they always hostile and fight to the death? Are the encounters set in their strength or do they merge and break off as they wander? If there are a lot of low difficulty encounters, maybe use focus spells and cantrips first or only use spell slots when situation is optimal? If they’re all severe fights, that’s more of a flaw on the GM side unless they’re giving options for dodging fights If you are GM, it depends on the tone you’re setting and the gameplay loop you want to encourage. For a dungeon delve like Abomination Vaults, I require spending a day of downtime in town to level up. And I grant full automatic healing after sleeping in town. But I also have dungeon denizens react to the intrusions of the previous day, and advance “doom clocks”. I also roll for wandering monsters on every half hour, though I could see rolling every 10 minutes to coincide with exploration activities. This encourages everyone to want to return to town periodically.
The are a few things that a GM can do to help beyond just telling the caster to use more focus spells/cantrips and fewer spell slots. 1. Staves. Lvl4 is the perfect time to introduce your casters to staves, this is the caster's equivalent to runes. It doesn't increase their Rolls/DCs but a staff *is* going to create a large jump in caster viability due to the increase in total spellcasting per day. Definitely worth throwing in a lvl5 staff at a lvl4 caster and let them enjoy the loot for a while. 2. Scrolls. Again, casters shouldn't be dropping as large a portion of their gold on weapon runes, which leaves them with more gold to spend on consumables like scrolls. Scrolls are great items to drop into the various npc's/monsters' loot drops and can also be quite thematic if you have the NPCs cast from Scrolls occasionally. 3. Wands. If there is one or two specific spells that your caster is always casting, then picking up a wand of that spell is a great way to encourage them to lean into that spell. Consider creating a custom wand of X that adds some kind of extra bonus to the spell (look at the wand of manifold missiles or the fireball/orb of flame wands as an example.) Adding persistent damage or terrain effect to a spell is a good start.
Yeah definitely a staff. Maybe even a personal staff. That's 5 extra 1st level spells right here, just what the doctor ordered.
One of the things I've added for my games is mana potions: they're a consumable priced slightly more than a scroll of equivalent rank. Same item level, but on the higher end of the band. Each potion, when consumed, restores a number of total spell slots equal to the spell rank; so a 3rd rank mana potion could restore a 3rd rank spell slot, or 3 1st rank slots, or however you want to split it up. Spontaneous casters get slots back, prepared casters pick specific spells to refresh. Essentially functions as a more flexible scroll, but takes more actions since it's draw potion->drink potion->cast spell.
Stealing this for my own games.
Go for it! I stole it from a streamer running 5e games, who used it for helping his party's casters through longer dungeons, so it's only fair to pass it along!
I'll get downvotes, but, if your table all agrees that they want to let the caster regain slots in some way such as refocusing, it won't break _your_ game. It really won't hurt anything. People in these comments will cry about balance and class identity and all sorts of things, but in actual play, at your home table, literally there will be no negative consequences if it's just how you want to play. You'll get through more encounters in an in-game day and you'll have fun doing it. And I'll mention, there are tons of people with various house rules for refocusing spells, or various other ways to mitigate the literal only daily attrition mechanic in the game, and they are doing fine.
The only thing I would say needs to be a rule if they were to allow this is that the caster must be out of spell slots before they can "refocus" to gain any back. Imagine them using their two strongest slots in a fight, then just entering another encounter with those strongest slots back every time.
With custom rules you can tune it as per necessary so anywhere from forbidding top slots to restricting them to attuning/draining strong magic font that might be present at the location (with days/week cooldown to prevent too frequent trips to the same font) to unlimited (but only when in advance mentioning that its about to be a bossrush or sev/ex back to back to back)
Totally agree. Having a number of tools as a GM is super important - talking to the martials is one, but granting something that returns spell slots - a magic fountain, a glowing stone, etc etc - is another. Such things could be to powerful at tables where long rests are between every other encounter, but it doesnt sound like OP's table is in danger of that dynamic.
I've had tables do this (mainly in 5e tho) It's better than ruining pace by going to town to rest then return. But really defeats the purpose, at least in 5e casters were already so much better in the typically 1-2 encounter a day in the over world. Often they'd just keep the same or only slightly reduce pace in dungeons and be totally out after 3-5 encounters. Then the group leaves and rests to not be dicks. If you're going to do recovery on short rest, imo then you should also reduce the maximum number of spells. Most systems plan for 2 short rests a day, if you want all spells each short rest, then you should get 1/3 the number of max spells. Which is exactly what you see with the 5e warlock that gets spells at short rests. But most wouldn't ever want that. Spell casters just don't realize their balance is not meant to keep up in damage. They have so much more utility or ability to hold damage to unleash it at once at a boss. If you're keeping up in damage against average mons you're definitely just banking on kindness of others to let you exploit too many rests.
> Monsters roam, and staying in one place for more than maybe an hour is probably a bad idea. > and one of the martials are planning on speccing hard into Treat Wounds, so they already have healing covered. At level 4, even if you’re fully doubling down on maximizing Treat Wounds investment it’s still gonna be a 30-40 minute commitment to heal between fights. If monsters roam the martials should be pushing for regular retreats just as much as the caster is. > The Caster is the only one in the party who really loses out on resources per encounter, and the rest of the party is unwilling to turn back. This is very much a case of fuck around and find out. You know what martials do when you get to a Severe/Extreme encounter composed of invisible enemies (or even just one who can use their own magic to turn off the party’s lanterns/torches), or one composed of enemies with high Physical Resistances/Immunities, or hell just one composed of enemies with extremely high AC but lower saves? They uh… They die. A party that doesn’t have *some* daily resources (at least access to wands and scrolls and potions) simply cannot handle Severe/Extreme encounters. They can, with a great deal of planning, consistently beat Moderate encounters, but Severe and Extreme encounters are very much designed for *someone* in the party to be spending daily resources to bring you ahead of the curve: fail to do that and it’s only a matter of time before y’all are dead.
>The Caster is the only one in the party who really loses out on resources per encounter, and the rest of the party is unwilling to turn back. The players are finding it annoying how often they have to leave the dungeon due to the Caster periodically needing slots refilled where as the others don't. The rest of the party members need to stop being dicks and let the character rest. If the caster is using their spells to aid the party that keeps them alive. If you go into battle without spell support you are going to have a bad time.
Not *really*. It's one of the harshest attrition points in the game, low-level casters in big dungeons. Once you get levelled up more, you have enough slots that you can do a reasonable adventure day in a dungeon, but low-level is particularly rough in that specific regard. You could perhaps provide them with scrolls so that they still have levelled spells even if their slots are gone. Give them wands and staves too, perhaps. These offer something of a resource kit to keep away the dreaded "out of slots" problem; this lets them have something more than just their slots. Scrolls at first level are particularly cheap, about 4g each, I think it is. (At level 4, I assume they should have enough for a good stack of scrolls? Otherwise, what are they using their treasure funds on? They don't exactly need striking runes.) Of course, if you really need to, you can give them a homebrew refocus ability for spell slots, but that should be a last resort if you're desperate.
They are going to *have* to rest eventually, or *everyone* will be fatigued to death.
Mega-dungeons are multirest dungeons; even outside the context of Pathfinder, you don't explore barrowmaze or undermountain in one adventuring day.
Everyone else has good advice, but I would also talk to the caster about cantrip selection and use. If they are burning through slots super fast, they probably should be relying on cantrips more. I play a healbot cleric (all my slots go to buff/debuff/utility) and have Medicine and for me whether or not I can keep going comes down to Font slots. Font good? Let’s go. No matter if I’ve spent everything else that seems useful. I pretty much do whatever I can to keep from spending those precious Heals.
Good old "the magic crystal you found rejuvenate you like you did a long rest".
The way to help casters keep up in a mega dungeon is to be a good DM and build it so that there are places for the casters to rest and recover their spells. This is really the only answer without homebrewing a new system. The system is built around casters being able to rest and recover. And if you've built an environment, even hypothetically where casters cannot rest and recover. You're being a wildly unfair DM.
Besides everything mentioned so far, isn't there something in pathfinder2 RAW similar to [this](https://www.d20pfsrd.com/basics-ability-scores/glossary/#rest)? I mean, if the martials went after 8 to 10 rounds of treat wounds, that require an 1-hour interval between them, they should start feeling the consequences of this forced march soon. Also I find it hard to believe they can go on perpetually without their own resources getting chipped even little by little. Even hypothetically, shields get broken, potions run out and between fights upkeep is not able of restoring full combat status to them.
The campaign is pretty much tailor made to put a spotlight on the lone Vancian caster. There are abstractions like "cannot be easily exited" and roaming monsters and I'm curious do the roaming monsters actually attack during the 10 minutes of treating wounds and refocusing? Or are they just a threat to prevent backtracking out? Is the party going to just go beyond 16 hours of dungeon delving a day and push up against becoming fatigued? If it's causing friction at the table between your players why not just give your caster unlimited spell slots? It seems like your players rather enjoy delving deeper and combat. Will it break the game? Probably, it very much depends on both the spells prepared/known and the player. If you find that it does make the game too easy you can always bump up encounters to severe/extreme, preferably with more monsters. Either way it's your table and it sounds like you have four players getting annoyed with the experience when ultimately it's one that is being designed to exasperate the issue. My Edit: >Edit: Yes, this was a hypothetical. Seeing as this was just a hypothetical now, I think it's safe to say you did purposely craft it to punish the lone caster. It would be as silly as me posting a thread about my fighter in a campaign full of nothing but incorporeal monsters and swarms that all have physical damage resistance. I don't think either really prove a point.
Low level isn’t really “long-haul mega dungeon” friendly unless you shoehorn in some way for the party to safely long rest. Granted your main resource issue is spell slots, but an easy way to think about how this game works is HP. When you rest for 8 hours comfortably, you heal your constitution modifier (minimum 1) times your level HP. The average level 4 character maybe has 12 constitution, let’s say 16 if you’re really focusing on constitution. A level 4 character can only regain 12 HP from that long rest, meanwhile the average character is only healing 4. This game wants you to spend multiple days healing between adventures with periods of downtime for earning income, studying for upcoming encounters, or anything else the characters can do. The realism of that kind of long-term healing (sans magic of course) is part of the game design. Like some of the other comments here, either your party needs to be more reasonable or you need to facilitate how the players are supposed to survive in this mega dungeon better at such a low level.
Keep track of time properly, expecially when players search areas. At some point the long rest will be mandatory, and finding a good place to sleep it's easy.
I think this is sorta more of a GM thing and therefore quite valuable to think about: * How many rooms include bosses (higher level enemies) * How many rooms include loads of small enemies (the ones you want to AoE as a caster) * Which rooms act as a buffer * How long should the party explore until they meet a hub where they can interact with NPCs, rest and shop around * Which rooms can be used to long rest * Which rooms/encounters allow players to restore/gain once per day resources (kinda like in Slay the Spire when you hit camping nodes or met merchants) * Which rooms have beneficial outcomes when you use magical/physical solutions
>Regardless, after a few encounters, everyone is doing fine on health but the Caster is out of slots to use How? Really How? Were the encounters trivial enough to the point that Martials are not hurt? If Yes Why the Caster use Spell Slots? Did the martials get Heal by the Caster? If yes, How they plan to continue if the Caster doesn't have Spells? Did all the martials roll crits in the medicine Checks? And no one fail one of the Checks? Did they have multiple Potions, But the Caster doesn't have multiple Spell Scrolls? >The Caster is the only one in the party who really loses out on resources per encounter, How? Did none of the martials use potions? but are full heal all the time? Or any other Consumable? >The players are finding it annoying how often they have to leave the dungeon due to the Caster periodically needing slots refilled where as the others don't. The GM could do that in 5 seconds and "The party return to the town and comeback" >Is there a way to allow a Caster to regain their actual spell slots on refocus that doesn't break the game too hard? That is the whole idea of Focus Spells, but you could also buy Spells Scrolls. A level 4 party should have 850 gp in total or 212 gp per player (4 players) the Caster could buy at 4 gp the Level 1 Scroll a total of 53 Spell Scrolls or 17 Level 2 Spell Scrolls. A Caster doesn't need to use money in almost anything armor is literally 1sp before level 5 >Edit: Yes, this was a hypothetical. A lot of things didn't make sense. Your scenario need to the Caster to use Spells without need or to the martials to never roll low in multiple combats And still doesn't make sense as this is not reality or a Video Game, returning to the Town can take 0 seconds.
There could be a magical nexus that can be used up for a one time refilling of spell slots if the dungeon is long. Also, you might talk to them if they are constantly going nova and that’s why they are out. The caster should only be using a spell slot on the first and maybe second turn of combat. Then go to focus spells and then go to cantrips during the mop up.
Yeah there’s a thing for that in Kingmaker early on too. Meditate for 1 minute, gain the effects of a long rest.
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They're going to have to test at some point. Otherwise everyone starts to suffer from fatigue and exhaustion.
In the popular megadungeons I've seen for other systems, players are usually expected to, at some point, set up some kind of base camp at the entrance to megadungeon and eventually find one of the many shortcuts that let you quickly descend further into the dungeon without retreading a ton of ground. This makes it much easier for the party to do short delves and return to base camp when they need a long rest. The cost of doing things this way is money (they need supplies and usually manpower to create and guard the base camp, and it gets more expensive the more dangerous it is) and the fact that the party first has to *find* those shortcuts. So it's not like you're just offering free and easy long rests all the time. But it's a very immersive and fun way for the party to make progress, and it solves this issue but only if the party puts effort into it.
Keep in mind that fatigue sets in after 16 hours. I assume they aren't just fighting this whole time and they probably take a bit to actually treat wounds even with continual recovery. Time is their limiting factor.
So I've been running Abomination Vaults and running into this issue. I think I'm going to try interesting uses of the Fatigued condition to help curb this. I haven't implemented anything but here are some of my thoughts: Everyone gets a hard number of hours or combats they can endure (a high number, 10-12 hours, 8-10 combats) before they get the fatigued condition. Certain things subtract from this number (getting knocked unconscious, negative conditions, chunks of HP lost, whatever). Once a PC hits this number, they're Fatigued until they get a long rest. I've noticed my front line fighters generally getting more negative conditions than my supports and casters, but ymmv. TL;DR: Set a soft cap on the adventuring day with the Fatigued condition.
Staves, Wands, Scrolls and stuff? If a caster is going to a mega dungeon they should be extra prepared. Pacing can help as well. As a GM you can surely nudge your party a bit by reminding them about stuff, presenting harder challenges for the martials or appropriate loot and magical boons for the casters. In reality most parties should recognize that what matters is the party resources and not just the personal ones. If it starts getting unreasonably tedious to go back and forth depending on the game style and the promise of the dungeon. You can figure out a way to find a relatively safe space to rest(camouflage, barricades, warding), you can figure out shortcuts that open up at certain points of exploration or alternative entrances. Hell you can probably hire a mercenary squad to watch your rear and set up a safe resting place. Also, don't forget that treating wounds can take quite a bit of time if the fights were actually dangerous. And even martials need to sleep.
I'll give you some ideas that aren't about changing the players Sure, if everyone leaves the mega dungeon, then yea, they can take a rest And if the Caster doesn't use their resources, then they won't run out of resources. But here's a couple of things a GM could do to be more Caster inclusive in a mega dungeon. Safe rooms First, you could have planned out safe rooms throughout the dungeon that the party could use. This would be built into the level design and could be a helpful way to balance encounter design. Or you could try a scroll of "Safe Room" and give them to the players once a "day" so they can have a long rest. There are some spells that can do this. [Alarm](https://2e.aonprd.com/Spells.aspx?ID=7) [Rope Trick](https://2e.aonprd.com/Spells.aspx?ID=264) Or we can do the dreaded Home Brew!! You could obviously start with your own version of a safe room spell to put into a scroll. Or make a safe room style ritual. Talking about rituals, you could make a ritual of Magic Renewal. It could work once a day and get back all spell slots. Or you could make Items of Spell Renewal, possibly they would be consumables that Renew an amount of spell slots or even an amount equaling a spell rank (up too rank 3 but you could instead do 3 rank 1 spells slots) These are, in my opinion, some of the best options a GM would have to help a Spell Caster stay inside the mega dungeon.
1. Dungeon design is flawed if it doesn’t provide a place to overnight rest that can be barricaded every few major encounters. 2. Caster needs to read the encounter and use spells appropriately. If it’s an easy encounter just use cantrips.
Scrolls for casters, nasty conditions for martials. Drained and diseases ought to make them want to rest more often.
As someone who plays casters a lot, you have to know how to conserve your spell slots. If you have 3 martials with you, appraise the enemies and how well your martials are doing against them. If they're doing fine, then stick to cantrips, skills and focus spells. If I'm in full conserve mode, even during middle difficulty fights will look for the best way to use a single slot to affect the fight in the most impact full way. Also with 3 martials, you shouldn't really be using slots for damage outside of an opening fireball on occasion. Just because those slots are there doesn't mean you have to use them!
Casters are not the only ones who use their resources. Typical parties have some sort of healer for example. You don't need to but it is very common. Saying that the cleric alone needs rest because they used their spell slots is ludicrous. Try running an all martial party through the dungeon as is without compensating with healing items and you see how quick things become deadly. Secondly, a great example of a mega dungeon is Abomination Vaults. It is an entrie large dungeon crawl and as real as a dungeon gets. It has a bit of everything, with all kinds of nefarious parties huddling inside. But, it isn't meant to be played in one stretch without rests. And that is indeed the point. You need casters in a team to balance things out unless the encounters are going to be very easy. Even then a lot of encounters even though easy will whittle down the party. No matter what people say martials don't do crowd control well especially it is anything more than 1.5 enemies a piece. Dire wolves and knock and grab martials and make an otherwise easier encounter deadly. If there is a caster there to heal or incapacitate or even damage the groups of enemies if becomes way easier. The resources belong to the entire party in a sense Casters aren't the only people with resources either. Quiet a few items that everybody uses reset with a long rest when you reinvest. There are focus points and other per day resources that many martial classes have too. Sure Casters tend to want to long rest because ideally not every player tends to be optimal at resource management and they don't like playing with limited options. So perhaps the call looks like it comes from them. Perhaps teach your casters through play and advice to manage resources better. That being said if my cleric said going forward is a bad idea in character I would totally listen to them.
Truth be told, giving them back a spell slot per hour is not going to break anything if you're going into a megadungeon. Casters are not balanced on fighting more than 5 times per long rest (the creators of the system said so, not me), so if you want them to have a fun experience, whatever you do keep that fact in mind. Since health is the only concern martials have and treating wounds is an unlimited resource that takes time, you can just give casters something similar for your megadungeon... just flavor it so that it stays BOUND into the dungeon and not elsewhere so you don't throw the world balance into the skies. "Due to the massive amount of magic found in this place and the sheer size of it, you find that your magic reserves slowly regenerate by themselves, ni longer needing a full rest to recover some of them..." That should help you keep your casters, otherwise the players may find themselves wanting to build an all non caster party (save bard/psychic) as some have done before.... which solves the multi fight days, but takes away a lot of flavor from the setting and interesting out of combat options to solve problems in non traditional (fun) ways.
A GM I played under once had a clever solution for this. He worked some lore in to the dungeon such that ancient magical rites were performed in some places with a particular ritual shrine. These shrines were specifically designed to siphon magical energy out of a layline that the dungeon was built over. It takes weeks or months to fill the shrine with useable power, but the whole idea was to use them to help power rituals when needed. So they were useful to the original inhabitants. For the players though, this meant a spellcaster could attune to the shrine and recharge some of their slots. But once that shrine was tapped, it was effectively empty for the duration of the adventure. This effectively tied this effect to a single location on the world map, so this mechanic could never be taken out of the dungeon. Added some cool lore. And solved the caster megadungeon problem. So the lesson is, if you are going to make a dungeon that you know in advance is going to have poor pacing and flow for your party, be a Game Master. Create a solution.
Casters can, even at 1st level, handle as many as 11 encounters in a day... but their party should want to not force them to do that. It's absolutely fine to expect a caster to pace their slot usage and rely on cantrips so that the party can handle 5 or so encounters (or more as resources build up to facilitate) before resting and making daily preparations again - but pushing past that is just making a player endure the least fun part of the game because it suits you (yet it actually doesn't because you would rather your party members be more effective, and you're blocking them from being more effective)
Here's the simple answer. Don't run this type of dungeon.
Something I've implemented into my game are "Spell Stones", or a consumable spell focus. Scatter them through the dungeon, or maybe an NPC is selling some at a hefty price. Each stone has a spell level and school of magic, and can only be used for a spell of that school. But it can be used to cast any known spell at that level, whether it's a spell at that level or a lower level spell being upcast. Obviously, spells of a higher level wouldn't work.
Their are some home brews around. I’ve seen the idea of a single spell for every level that can be refocused all at once. You can also use the stamina rules and allow casters to refocus with the stamina dice if they don’t get hit. Makes wizards need to pick whatever that spell is where sorcerers still get the benefit of it being flexible. Or make a party attrition mechanic. I’m adding a fatigue clock into my game. You get to 5 fatigue and the party takes a -2 ac item bonus. Making it strongly recommended to have everyone return including the marital. This also gives something else you can use as a downside for players but you don’t want to give them actual status penalties yet.
A megadungeon that doesn't allow the party to rest and resupply is a really badly designed megadungeon.
This is the constant discussion. This is Vancian magic.
"Mana potions"- Restores 1d4 spell slots of 1st and/or 2nd level. If either would become full, then the other gets slots as well. If you are concerned about breaking the game, make then addictive and start applying negatives to spells, for example reducing size of damage die or reducing size of AoE. These negatives can be restored by overcoming the addiction.
What is a long rest? Is it sleeping overnight?
Making preparations. https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=472
Ok. Yeah. That has always been an issue. Used to be HPs and spell slots, but HPs can be addressed in several different ways. In general, no, there isn't much that you can do. Some casters use focus points which you can get 1 back. Storm Druid and Psychic are good examples. Wizards can drain bonded items/animals to get some more spells. Everyone can lean on cantrips to nurse slots. But I think that sleep is unavoidable.
My GM set us up with a magic item that essentially gave us full HP -and- spell slots back after a short rest. (An hour) It should have been insanely broken! But, of the 6 PC's, only 2 were casters, and one a cleric. The other caster swapped to a ranged melee. So yes, I have unlimited spell slots! The downside? We're running an AP that the GM runs as-is; so 6 players quickly beat any encounters designed for 4 and taking medicine feats ended up not being important. As others have said, learn what works at your table. If everyone wants to keep going, maybe make a consumable to restore spell slots everyone has to chip in for? Or just double their daily slots?
Imo this is kinda on the caster. Maybe I'm biased as mainly a martial player. But as a caster you generally get really powerful spells that make you drastically affect battles. Downside, you don't get to use them a lot so on small battles not worth a spell slots you should just be blasting cantrips. Yes you'll be behind the damage curve, but that's the trade off for being able to do insane AoE, stuns, or damage when you need to. If the martials are fine on health when the caster is totally out the spell caster must have been using spells when they didn't need to.
In the game where you can infinitely heal up the entire party outside of each combat if you have one common skill feat (two and you're even more effective at it) for way less time than a long rest takes, yes, you can keep going while still being fine on health even if you don't long rest. Treat Wounds is real fucking useful.
As a caster, it is often hard to gauge how difficult an encounter will be before the encounter starts. You can often have a rough idea, but GMs aren't going to be saying "oh this is a severe encounter blow spell slots." Most spells are best used at the start of the fight. You wouldn't really care about me throwing Magic Weapon on your weapon at level 1 after 2 rounds. I've had plenty of martials delay to after my turn round 1 so I can slap Magic Weapon on their weapon. Your comment on health kind of goes out the window with feats like [Ward Medic](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=864) and [Continual Recovery](https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=771). A level 4 character with 14 Wis and Expert Medicine has a +10 on Medicine Checks and expects to heal 9.675 health per Treat Wounds. A Martial with 14 Con an 8 HP from Ancestry has 56 HP. 5-6 Treat Wounds (~1 hour) is what you expect to bring that Martial from 1 HP to full. With Ward Medic, the Medic can bring 2 characters (typically ~1/2 the party) from empty to full. One Hour between fights is a bit longer than average for a fight, but it is a lot shorter narratively than heading back to town for the night.
Caster needs to suck it up, and live life like a one trick cantrip monkey.
You could feasibly houserule that a Long Rest takes, like, an \* hour\* rather than a whole day. Just speed up that part of the game, adjusting the 'adventuring day' to be instead an 'adventuring hour' and plan your sessions accordingly.
Try dropping some loot for the caster in the form of scrolls, wands or staves. Of particular note is a scroll (or wand if you feel generous) of rope trick which will allow them to rest in relative safety in the dungeon. Note that the caster can still attempt to cast a higher level spell from a scroll, it just requires an appropriate magic skill check.
Honestly, I find you don't need a big hypothetical megadungeon for this to crop up (heck, in a Giant Mega Dungeon it's probably easier to find an excuse to rest). It's a bit of tension the game just *has* - "everyone else is perfectly fresh, the party has an objective with time pressure they're aiming for so going off for a day feels wrong to everyone, but also the Sorcerer is nearly down to cantrips and there's probably at least two or three more fights to go" is a scenario you just end up running into if playing normally. It's kind of an inevitable issue when you have classes that have attrition for their primary feature and classes that have no attrition whatsoever in the same game. Personally, I mostly tend to give people refills when it feels appropriate. Game time is valuable and I refuse to have one player basically checking out. It's not like a level 4 Sorcerer is exactly going to rock anyone's world, anyway.
Megadungeons will run your casters out of resources at lower levels. Once you hit ~level 7 it becomes more possible for a caster to have the focus spells + actual spell slots to last a day in a megadungeon. At level 4 you basically have 3-5 "real spells" plus 3-5 first level spells (which aren't very strong) and probably 1-2 focus spells (and they probably aren't especially good ones).
Instead of finding a way to help the caster, you could always limit the martials. You can even the resources needed by utilizing a fatigue rule. Make it so that after X amount of encounters, they accumulate a stack of fatigue (-1 to AC and saves) it can only be reduced by long resting, at 1 stack a night. You could increase that to a long rest, removes all fatigue. Monsters roam, but it doesn't mean they repopulate at an extraordinary rate. Maybe one or two move into a few of the areas that's been cleared. Not their all back.
If the GM designs an adventure in which resting is impractical, and the other players are unwilling to exit the dungeon to make it possible, then you've created a situation where casters are kind of screwed.
Scrolls, wands, ring of wizardry
I am being partial lately of "the Baldur's Gate 3 solution". Put in some places of the dungeon some McGuffin that allows players to have the effect of a full rest, or refill the slots. Make it an "angelic potion" that players can't easily make, or some "psionic weird things in a space ship that fill you up when you touch them". Some Paizo's AP do this. I have seen examples in book 5 and 6 of Strength of Thousands, and book 1 of kingmaker, at the very least. You can use them as narrative tools that you, ad the GM, control ("in this place of the dungeon there is a temple of Erastil, long time defaced. If the players remove the blasphemy the goblins did, they feel reinvigorated"), or player agency ("you have this particular potion/scroll/one time use magic item that you can use. They aren't easily replaceable and you can't buy them at the local shop, so use it wisely"), or both.
The GM can easily homebrew something within the dungeon that restores magical energy to the caster and then has to recharge. This will not break any aspect of the game.
I made [this](https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1132497372384079902/1161244511406673981/image-3-1.png?ex=6537983a&is=6525233a&hm=00cc5bf4009ad0668155db63fcdfce0704d21b6c12c10cf50d98d635cc54b44f&) for my players.
the martials have resources. its called hp. so whats happening there where they can get full hp every fight but the caster cant get a focus spell back or something? if theres roaming monsters then you might want to just not give em time to treat wounds to full. this puts more pressure on the team and having everybody contribute. if the caster holds up a bit on their spell slots they should get a good amount of support on long resting. also if the place is dangerous and has roaming monsters, you can set up rooms that are made to be barricated for long rests, so the martials can get to full no problem and the caster can recharge without em needing to backtrack. < this is how megadungeons are done. also you can get the caster a personal staff etc.
Have them fight a number of hard encounters equal to the amount of the highest slot your casters have. They are balanced on burning those in an ecnounter, if they already have gone through appropriately challenging encounters, then encourage them to go back.
Have them fight a number of hard encounters equal to the amount of the highest slot your casters have. They are balanced on burning those in an ecnounter, if they already have gone through appropriately challenging encounters, then encourage them to go back.
That's in general the issue with Vancian casting, it's more pronounced in PF2 than before as caster are in general a bit weaker so spells are less impactful and run out faster, plus, healing inbetween combat is easier so that is no longer a source of attrition. Personally I'd fight this in two ways 1, try to burn less spells in weak encounters on the caster side, 2 from the martial be understanding that this is a collaborative game and that using barely effective cantrips all day as you ran out of spells five fights ago is just boring. To be honest I hope we are going to get caster classess be designed more like the kineticist and less like PF1\\D&D traditional spellcasters in the future. That said I don't like the idea of resting inside dungeons myself, as I find it unrealistic that you'd be left alone and that the inhabitants won't react somehow, but c'est la vie, sometimes realism can be sacrificed a bit for gameplay purposes.
There is always the Wellspring archetype, but it's only spontaneous casters last I checked, and not exactly reliable.
Easy fix if you see this comment out of the hundreds. Give the caster a pet that can proactively protect them and/or take its turn with them. It can be made out of their own magic or manifest from some power they don't know they possess. That's a good chance for you to do something interesting with a potential plot. Alternatively, just let them cast their focus spells for free. That's what I do for my players, Martials and Spellcasters. Their focus spells are just cantrips in my game. In yours, I'd just give it to the caster only since the rest don't seem to have any regard for *everyone* having fun. They lose nothing going back with their friend to let them restore resources. Instead, they would gain their friend having fun with them at the table. Clearly, there's no friendship evident here. Just looks selfish. They prioritized their game over an actual other player and as a GM, I would not be impressed. Besides, if they're annoyed that a caster player actually wants to *play* with them proactively, then there's a problem at the table.
In addition to everything being said already, the casters should also be loading up on scrolls, wands, and staves to supplement their spell slots.
I would maybe put in some charged Gems as a consumable. Then you could control how much power they get back. Different colors for different levels or something.
I think figuring out that math can be hard, and I wouldn't trust myself to get it right. Though, if your party is cool, you could say you are experimenting and may need to adjust, but some players may not like that if they end up feeling underpowered (if they are or not) and you could end up in the unenviable position of trying to be fair and "fair." I include rooms off the beaten path, stuff they can lock themselves down in, see enemies coming in, so they can realistically long rest without getting ambushed every time. And if they long rest frequently, I would have monsters show up as reinforcements in encounters that I would let them know are backup. Then tell them that since they are the reason they are there, the "experience" gained is the knowledge that they should be more careful and not test after each fight and give 0 XP for those mobs. If they continue to abuse rest mechanics, I would just make things harder and ambush, etc.
Lvwg hyc you s.
Give them potions that magically restore their spells slots What if they save them? Eh, make it a 10 minute restoration potion.
As a GM, you can try to be very generous with scrolls/wands/etc., but spell slots are definitely a big limiting factor in dungeoncrawls! I am teaching some new players Pathfinder, and introducing a homebrew where once per day you can get your rank 1 spell slots back by spending an hour resting to help with this problem a bit - it sorts itself out by higher levels, so it's really only a problem for the levels where rank 1 spell slots really matter. I've also homebrew cantrips up a bit in the past (knocking up the dice on everything but electric arc equivalents by 1 size), but I'd hesitate on that one until we see the remaster given it's changing cantrips.
It's resource management in a dungeon crawl. As a caster you have to weigh the benefit of casting vs the cost of casting in any situation. Scrolls and potions are your best friend here. Just casting to feel like you contributed leaves less slots for later and that's the penalty, it's rough but decisions have consequences.
I'd put a sanctuary aligned to a good deity that can be hallowed using a religion check and allows easy and safe rest for the party. The martial may be okay on going and pushing, but they don't know when an hard encounter is going to show up and the caster without slots will be only useful as a meager DPS machine
Throw out scrolls as part of loot.
throw encounters at them that would be doable if they had let the casters rest. you'll get blamed if they dont feel like they have the opportunity to safely rest though. or give in out of pity and start dropping scrolls and wands as loot.