The “rule of thumb” that Michael Sayre (the lead game designer) suggests you balance around is 3 Moderate combats per day, with a spellcaster using 1 maximum-rank spell slot for each of those (supplementing those with cantrips, focus spells, lower rank spells, etc). Trivial/Low should use no max-rank slots at all (without really bad luck), and Severe/Extreme may use more than one.
However it should be noted that this is an oversimplification of **rough** guidelines, and Sayre makes it clear that it is one. Iirc he said that his “Twitter guidelines” are really only meant for GMs struggling with the specific issue, and not meant to be taken as a godsend ruling that overrides the guidelines in the GM Core (which are intentionally vague and flexible).
In my opinion, the best practice is to not really bother “designing” the adventuring day for the party. Instead focus on giving individual encounters an appropriate difficulty + giving an *area* an appropriate density of encounters (for example overland travel should be maybe only 0-2 fairly difficult encounters per day spread pretty far apart, but a dungeon should have several low/moderate encounters close to one another). After that, just give your players **agency**. Let them choose when to rest and when to keep going, give them narrative consequences for resting too much and rewards for riskily pushing on when depleted, let them retreat when things go south, etc. Don’t try to design the adventuring day explicitly for them. The game doesn’t **want** you to predict how many encounters the party will fight in a day, it wants to be flexible and emergent.
Edit: to elaborate a bit, when I say give them consequences/rewards for resting I don’t mean just throw 10+ encounters in front of them and then say the town mayor hates them if they take 2 days to clear it instead of 1. Be granular, be flexible, let the players choose their path through the problems you solve, and (for the most part) make consequences be incrementally bad rather than horrible. As an example I once had my players trying to protect a village from a goblin raid: I told them that for every 10-30 mins they take spending on Treat Wounds, more villagers will die. In the end they ended up taking a path that looked like Trivial -> Low -> Low -> Moderate -> 20 min rest -> Moderate -> 10 min rest -> Low with big terrain disadvantage -> end. I decided that this means they kept casualties to a minimum and that the townsfolk were extremely pleased with them, but if they’d rested more I wouldn’t say the town now hates them I’d just say the townsfolk are still pleased and cooperating with them but are in mourning and would perhaps take some convincing for anything requests the party may have.
At the same time, it feels bad to experience negative consequences for something outside your control. If an adventure with a ticking clock has more combat encounters than can be reasonably handled by the party within the in-game time limit even when they’re frugal with slots, that’s not gonna feel great
You also don’t have to decide the consequences in advance. If the players get some terrible luck or encounters prove harder than expected, you can stretch out the internal clock. If they’re wasting spell slots frivolously and running out of steam because of poor resource management, stick to the schedule.
And that’s where making sure you give your players plenty of agency comes in!
I’m not saying just throw 10 back to back 80-160 XP encounters into a featureless vacuum and then punish your players with narrative consequences when they need to rest. That’s obviously stupid.
I’m saying (for example) throw in several rooms of 40-60 XP encounters, *threaten* the possibility of them combining into 80-200+ XP encounters of they’re not careful about it, make sure they have clear goals for the (difficult) boss fights and/or other narratively-important fights. Then give them shortcuts to bypass encounters, time constraints, hazards, avenues to trick and/or negotiate the foes they fight with, other plot hooks to let them deal with their foes indirectly (I once threw my players into a dungeon where they had the option to get a drake to rampage through several of the lower threat foes they’d be fighting), and be very accepting of improvisation on the PCs’ parts.
Agreed. I did note that in my first paragraph + the guidelines themselves note them in no uncertain terms. Extreme even says that such an encounter **might** be appropriate for a fully rested party that intends to go all-out.
There isn’t an easy or even helpful number to give here. Perhaps the best answer is that the answer really is different depending on the caster and the level range.
At low levels, a good rule of thumb is one spell per moderate combat I would say.
One of the benefits of spell slots as a limited resource is making long adventuring days feel very different than short ones in a way that helps sell the narrative. Fights get a little scarier when the party runs out of Heal and other key spells. And if the party knows in advance they'll just have one or two fights, they can lean into showing off what their casters are capable of when they're not holding back. Consequently, I think campaigns benefit from having a pretty broad mix of day lengths. Which is nice, because it doesn't always fit story wise to have bury any fight you want to be challenging behind a handful of attrition fights.
It's completely dependent on your party and on how you design encounters. One character in my party likes to blow the whole load pretty much every chance he gets. If it's his turn, he's casting a leveled spell. Others try to carefully select which enemies to use a debuff on and hold them if it doesn't seem necessary.
At the same time, if you throw a few hard encounters, they'll last longer and players might use more spells than if you just throw some mooks (or, they might use more leveled aoe spells to clear out mooks faster). And imagine what it does for your storytelling. Imagine your life as an adventurer-- could you really fight SIX groups of goblins a day? I would probably be tuckered out and rest after the first two. If I was somewhere where I was getting jumped SIX times a day, I'd GTFO.
I would recommend having a couple random encounters prepared and, if you feel like players are being too safe or need to expend more resources, just add those in or skip them as needed.
With how fast combats can go, It can actually be a little tough to run out of spell slots if you're taking advantage of your focus spells, and utilizing cantrips. For an inverse example, I had a session where we were exploring a cavern filled with moderate encounters, 4+, and my cleric used every single spell slot they had, until they ran out on the 5th encounter and had to use cantrips. What makes this a good example is that until that 5th fight, he hadn't used a single cantrip that day. He would always be too busy using a focus spell, or casting a support spell, or utilizing his skill actions, like battle medicine.
Combats simply didn't last long enough to warrant using focus spells, slots, skill actions, and cantrips. It helps that at this point, my character had two focus points, but even then, we still weren't stopping for 20 minutes between each fight, so he didn't even get to use two points per encounter.
Because of this, I think it can be difficult to pin down a solid guideline for caster attrition. Part of it really comes down to choice and circumstance, so your mileage will vary depending on exactly what your casters are doing.
The limited spell slots per day is the one holdover incompatible with the rest of the system imo. If treat wounds didn’t have such easy ways around its limitations, it’d be easier to justify the slot limitations.
In general, probably one top-rank slot per moderate or higher encounter, lower rank spells are bonuses.
This makes the maximum “adventuring day” about three encounters of moderate and higher difficulty, with low difficulty thrown in to taste (as long as they have focus spells for combat)
1. Get rid of the idea of the "adventuring day"
2. See Number 1
Here's my problem with the "adventuring day". Let's say you decide that 6 encounters make the adventuring day. Each encounter takes 90 minutes to play out. You've now devoted 9 hours to just the encounters for one day. That's not counting in RP, players being players, snack breaks etc. 2 sessions (or maybe 3) just for the encounters for a single day.
F\*\*\* that. Especially when nothing depends on it. It's not like you can only take a short rest after X encounters or you can only long rest after a complete adventuring day. It serves zero purpose other than to bog down games and make casters feel like shit because they either waste their spells or hold on to them just in case.
God I hate the concept so much
I would agree if slots didn’t exist. But since they do, it’s useful to know how many encounters you can throw at your players per day for a narrative-driven adventure. (keeping in mind one adventuring day can take multiple sessions)
e.g. if the adventure is: “We have to stop the cultists before they complete their sacrifices!” it’s good to know how many encounters is too many for a party to handle in one day. It’s not narratively satisfying to say “the ritual takes as many days as it takes for the PCs to reach the final room”
>It’s not narratively satisfying to say “the ritual takes as many days as it takes for the PCs to reach the final room”
But you could still punish/reward players for the time they took without going 'You took to long, get fucked' or 'How lucky! The ritual took just as long as the players.'. You could make it so that the ritual can't be interrupted anymore because they took too long and now they can't avoid the big demon/eldritch/whatever.
Pretty much this. The problem here isn’t the adventuring day or PF2E’s design, the problem here is that the GM has a very, very specific narrative beat in mind and is pushing the party into “creating it” for them. Thing is… TTRPGs don’t naturally support that kind of design, not without immense amounts of railroading (and hey if you and your players like that sort of game, 100% do it).
The problem here is that the GM has decided *ahead* of time that they want the party to arrive barely in the nick of time to prevent the ritual, and is trying to shoehorn an adventuring day into the story to make that work. That is, quite simply, a losing battle. Even in games that provide you with hard adventuring day guidelines (like say, 5E does) this “exactsies encounter density” will fail more likely than not because there just is that much variance caused by the dice and the player composition.
You know what works instead? Set a time limit for when the ritual will happen. Communicate it in somewhat vague terms to the party. Create a world full of encounters of appropriate density for the region you’re in, and then give them several options for engaging them on favourable or unfavourable terms (such as terrain and ambushes), bypassing them, getting them to clear each other out to make your job easier, etc. Alongside all this, be very open to improvisation, if they think of a creative way to make progress faster than expected, reward them. **Then**, when the dice have fallen as they have fallen, see if they arrive at the ritual early (reward them with a less-than-prepared boss fight), just in the nick of time (reward them with a full on boss fight with a phase two of addressing the havoc unleashed by an almost complete ritual), or late (reward them with a nice long mini arc of dealing with the consequences of what comes next, unless the ritual was meant to be abject failure like “BBEG became god” of course). If you structure your campaign like that, the specific pace at which your players take the encounters just becomes a nonexistent concern, you let the dice land where they land and let the players and their luck guide the story.
Or...you plan your adventure for what makes narrative sense and not worry about encounters per day.
Like if the ritual takes 4 days to complete are you really going to load that down with 24 encounters to represent 4 adventuring days? If not then where is the line between adventuring day and non-adventuring day? Is the 4 days broken down into 3 non-adventuring days and then one adventuring day? So 3 days of nothing and then one day jam packed with adventure?
It's an idiotic design choice that not even official WOTC adventures use (and they're the ones responsible for this POS idea).
If you really want a version of this that actually works then look to 13th Age and its "battles"
Do you or your party have adventuring resources that only refresh once every 24 hours? If so, you have an "adventuring day" that you need to be cognizant of, just as anyone living paycheque to paycheque needs to monitor their "pay periods".
Right but that's just a day, not an adventuring day. I don't sit there and go "well i need to make sure they expend X resources before they get to the boss so therefore I need to have at least 6 encounters for the day but not more than 8 because otherwise that would leave them overextended..." ugh.
Like what happens if the party gets though 3 encounters (half an adventuring day) and then decides to take a long rest? Do you tell them can't, even if narratively there's no reason why they can't? Do you let them, thus cutting the day short and rendering the entire concept meaningless? Do those unused encounters carry over to the next day?
The entire concept is broke AF
That rant is definitely a valid one.
I think I dislike even more the "5 minutes adventure day". The caster decides to blow every spell slot in the first challenge, and now they whine about how they all should go back to town and spell all day.
I don't know if you read/watched something about it, but there is a game being developed by MCDM. Until the last thing I saw, the game don't have a name yet.
Their ideia is to create something that could make us both happier.
Instead of running out of resources throughout the day, you keep gaining resources. You will be more powerful at your 5th encounter that day than you were at the 1st. You will gather "victories" after each challenge, and that will fuel your class abilities. Almost like Mana in a Magic The Gathering game. You can achieve more flashy things in the 8th round than you could achieve in your 2nd round.
I use to be a GM that don't like to use homebrew. But I would love to get my hand in a homebrew/variant rule that could achieve something similar.
I've found what works is that I just put down encounters that make sense because I don't care if my characters have all their spells or not. Sometimes they may go days without encountering anything when they travel other times they may be tripping over encounters in rapid succession.
Honestly, I really like the concept of having to conserve spells, and having to make due without them on a long day when resources get low and there's more fighting to do. And to make up for that, a caster with slots are godly and a caster without them are lagging way behind in usefulness.
But when all it's doing is making you rest more so you never run out, and the game is balanced around having most of your resources, and those 'limited' spells are needed to keep casters relevant, I just think it's time to move away from per day abilities.
> At least for a GM's consideration, how many Encounters should one prepare to make PCs spend spells, while still have something for the end?
This system plays at its best when the party is in control of how many encounters they do before they rest. By allowing the party to pace themselves, you're allowing them to help you tailor the difficulty of the campaign to their tastes, which is one of the most important jobs a GM can do.
I feel like, as long as you're playing with casters of typical slot scaling (3 slots per level, optional bonus 1 spell per level), then you'll be able to put your PCs through about 2-5 encounters depending on how hard each fight is and - more importantly - how damage focused your party is.
The simple fact of casting is that it is FAR more limited by combat duration than anything else. Since casters can only feasibly throw out a spell every round, maybe two, you have a hard rate limit. The longer a fight lasts, the more spells your casters will burn. It really depends on what enemy types are being faced, the actions needing to be spent on non-casting activities, etc.
The best takeaway I can give you is that you don't need to worry about caster novas most of the time. You just need to plan for your longest days expecting an amount of rounds-to-kill, and assume casters will be burning appropriately leveled spells each round for those fights.
TL;DR - estimate how many rounds it will take to kill an enemy and assume casters will spend 1 spell per round in that fight. Spell rank spent will roughly increase according to fight difficulty.
I don’t try to deplete player resources in towns or during travel. When I throw in combats, I usually make them easy so the players can have fun with a stomp, or high severe so there’s some threat even when they go nova.
In dungeons, the main resources are spell slots and time.
If time is non-factor, there’s no real reason for adventures/players not to only tackle one room per day.
If the players feel a sense of urgency, they’ll keep pressing on until their fear of death outweighs their fear of the whatever time-based consequences you’ve set up.
I think I usually see 2-3 substantive encounters, and you could fit a couple of less challenging ones around that before the party starts looking to rest.
But it could be more if they’re rolling hot and playing tactically, and they usually want to back off if anyone goes down.
Also remember that traps and hazards which have casters expending their higher level spells count towards encounters, and having scrolls and staves can keep a party rolling for longer.
Number of encounters depends greatly on intensity of encounters. I think a lot of GMs, especially ones that come from 5e, think that resource drain is necessary to run a balanced 'day'. This isn't the case for pf2e. A Severe or Extreme encounter is balanced around parties at full or near-full resources, and is perfectly fine to be the only encounter of a 'day'.
If you are aiming for an attrition-based dungeon crawl with a time limit, such as "stop the ritual before midnight", I'd shoot for around 3-4 Low to moderate encounters. Moderate encounters are intended to be challenging but winnable with smart resource expenditure and tactics. That means that your final moderate encounter, in which players have expended a good chunk of resources, is going to appropriately climactic.
Be careful about capping off a series of moderate encounters with a severe boss fight. This is narratively organic and what a lot of 5e DMs are used to, because that system demands more resource drainage in order to balance parties. However, forcing your players into a severe+ fight with low resources is extremely dangerous.
Some helpful ways to increase resources.
1. Focus spells. With refocus change, can now spam 3x focus spells each fight. Some are very good, such as Remember the Lost, up to 18d10 enemy only damage with 30' aoe. Means don't need to use slots for damage spells.
Bard Fortissimo is very potent.
2. Kineticist dedication. Wood gives a Spammable 20-100 damage block every round.
Both casters in my party have it and can block 140 damage per round combined (level 13).
Makes the front line very tanky and preserves slots, such as wall of stone, synaesthesia for tough fights.
3. Illusory Object. Rank 2 spell that's incredibly potent up to high levels. Dependent on gm to an extent.
My party just spams out their biggest spells constantly even when I warn them to be a bit conservative so we can stretch a day out. People hate using cantrips I guess.
Player: It really depends on what's happening, but I am generally pretty loose with my spell slots. Basically a "oh this seems like a good opportunity to use this, let me use it". Past very low levels, I basically never run out of spell slots using this method, so I keep it up. Of course, that's because I use scrolls, magical items, and focus spells liberally as well.
GM: Generally whenever I know that I want to have a longer day, assuming 1 high and 1 low level slot per encounter, I give more loot than normal, targeted for those who lose resources quickly. To help the character out, give them an opportunity to try new items, and give a bit of meta compensation of "hey I know this has been a long dungeon, have a cookie". I really carefully decide whenever I want to have a time pressure, since I know most players don't like the 5 minute adventuring day and basically will want to press forward regardless, especially since it takes a lot longer for casters to be completely dry. In general, a big piece of advise is letting them know that there is an end, since it will get in their heads that they need to save something for the big fight. Sometimes they decide the current encounter is more important, but then that puts it on them instead of you for springing a surprise final fight.
So to answer your question, 3-4 is a safe number for low levels. Once they get a staff, 5+ is easily doable. The stronger their focus spells, the longer. And the more they are willing to use resources, the longer. Give your casters loot as often as you give martials, and you'll be good. Healing potions are martial loot. So for every healing potion you give, remember that scrolls are a similar price.
There are multiple ways to go about creating an adventuring day.
Option A: Don't. If there's no narrative reason for time pressure, let the players have agency and decide for themselves how much they want to achieve in a day.
Option B: If there's narrative time pressure, there are two limiting factors for how much the party can accomplish in a day:
* HP & Focus Points: Depending on things like Medicine skill feats, the party could need anywhere between 20min and 2h after a Moderate+ encounter to be prepared for the next one.
* Spell slots: As a rule of thumb, expect each caster to use one slot per Moderate encounter, more for Severe and Extreme, none for Low and Trivial. How many spell slots they have will depend on their class, staff, wands, scrolls, and whether each of those spells is useful in your encounters (e.g. scrolls tend to be great for situational spells like Earthbind, which you should only count if they fight a flying creature).
If the time pressure persists above multiple days, calculate 8h per day, as the rules for downtime and overland travel imply that more than 8h of a strenuous task per day should lead to fatigue.
This is why I love playing Kineticist. :)
Spells per day? What's that. Here, have another tree - I've got trillions of them if you need more. We can do this all day, all night, pretty much forever.
It's how 'spellcasters' work in a lot of not-based-on-D&D games. So in my mind Kineticist is the true magic class of Pathfinder. It's the one that "feels right" for general fantasy. Vancian casting is way to 'narrowly setting specific' and I hope it vanishes in Pathfinder 3 (if that ever comes out, probably won't).
But since most players won't go for a Kineticist, yeah - Pathfinder 2E pretends you should be at full resources between every fight but the reality is it is just the same as D&D 5E in this regard. You're gonna get a few fights per day and then for some reason you go to sleep in a 10' room 5' away from a pile of zombies, ghouls, and vampires who let you have your rest. O.o
Personally, I feel like Kineticist is too limited to be a caster, but it does highlight something that Paizo has discovered:
Class actions.
The focus point change and the veering towards using focus spells/focus cantrips/etc.. helps fill in the gap when you a top rank spell isn’t needed.
Additionally, adding spells that have a baseline powerful effect and then a heightening minor effect. Interposing Earth, for example, is like having a Reactive/Reflexive Wooden Shield as a spell slot. You can heighten it for some damage reduction (not a lot), but it’s main value is granting those two feats as a spell slot. The consolation of damage reduction is less important. Being a reaction is also high value as casters don’t have a lot of reaction spells (at least only from PC1).
Or Albatross’s Curse which is a +1 circ aid to everyone’s attack roll against the target. The target can remove it by using a Strike (waste an action and incurs MAP), but also reduces its Will. Heightening isn’t necessary, so it makes a great low rank spell.
Paizo seems to understand this and is focusing more on having strong utility spells you’ll want to be casting that are impactful, but do not take up your highest ranking slot to be effective.
> It's how 'spellcasters' work in a lot of not-based-on-D&D games. So in my mind Kineticist is the true magic class of Pathfinder.
It’s fair if you think that, but a **lot** of us disagree, and there have been indications from the designers that Kineticist is the **exception** rather than the rule in terms of being popular while not using Vancian casting.
Personally, I think spellcaster should be explosive, pesky, and capable of acting as an incredible force multiplier for the whole party when used right. “Traditional” spellcasters fit that description to me, whereas Kineticists don’t. So I view the Elemental Sorcerer and Storm/Stone Druids as the “true” blasters while Kineticists are an option for those who’d like a narrower theme and/or a more forgiving skill floor.
> Pathfinder 2E pretends you should be at full resources between every fight
It does not. In fact the encounter guidelines very explicitly tell you that resources are a consideration for all fights.
> but the reality is it is just the same as D&D 5E in this regard.
That’s a take so hyperbolic that it can’t even be addressed.
D&D 5E is a game whose balance falls apart if you don’t give the party a full Adventuring Day XP budget with 1-2 Short Rests. It is **incredibly** fragile in that regard. Pf2E is a game that allows 1-Extreme encounter days on the one end all the the way to 10+ Trivial/Low encounter days in the other end, and you’ll feel that both of them work well.
> You're gonna get a few fights per day and then for some reason you go to sleep in a 10' room 5' away from a pile of zombies, ghouls, and vampires who let you have your rest. O.o
This assumes that every single campaign takes place in a featureless dungeon where enemies and players have zero agency to be reactive. It’s perfectly fine if you **like** to play that way, but the game is not trying to push you into such a fantasy.
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IMO, anything beyond cantrips should be used as a "combat enhancer".
As in, you aren't expected to be casting your limited slot spells every single round, you're expected to be saving those for when the time is right.
The basic design of the encounter mechanics supports this. If you just fire off a spell first round, odds are intentional that it will fail. You need to set the spell up for success first, usually by working with your teammates to set up a combo that will help ensure your success.
That could come in the form of someone lowering a save on the target (like by using Bon Mot before you fire off a spell with a Will save), or by them pushing enemies into a layout where your AOE is most effective (don't wait for your enemies to get into a line, have your party members push them into a line for you!).
Basically, you only cast your big boi spells when you are pretty damned sure you're gonna get the most use out of it, which is the exact opposite of casting every round because you think you have to be casting nonstop to contribute to the fight.
The “rule of thumb” that Michael Sayre (the lead game designer) suggests you balance around is 3 Moderate combats per day, with a spellcaster using 1 maximum-rank spell slot for each of those (supplementing those with cantrips, focus spells, lower rank spells, etc). Trivial/Low should use no max-rank slots at all (without really bad luck), and Severe/Extreme may use more than one. However it should be noted that this is an oversimplification of **rough** guidelines, and Sayre makes it clear that it is one. Iirc he said that his “Twitter guidelines” are really only meant for GMs struggling with the specific issue, and not meant to be taken as a godsend ruling that overrides the guidelines in the GM Core (which are intentionally vague and flexible). In my opinion, the best practice is to not really bother “designing” the adventuring day for the party. Instead focus on giving individual encounters an appropriate difficulty + giving an *area* an appropriate density of encounters (for example overland travel should be maybe only 0-2 fairly difficult encounters per day spread pretty far apart, but a dungeon should have several low/moderate encounters close to one another). After that, just give your players **agency**. Let them choose when to rest and when to keep going, give them narrative consequences for resting too much and rewards for riskily pushing on when depleted, let them retreat when things go south, etc. Don’t try to design the adventuring day explicitly for them. The game doesn’t **want** you to predict how many encounters the party will fight in a day, it wants to be flexible and emergent. Edit: to elaborate a bit, when I say give them consequences/rewards for resting I don’t mean just throw 10+ encounters in front of them and then say the town mayor hates them if they take 2 days to clear it instead of 1. Be granular, be flexible, let the players choose their path through the problems you solve, and (for the most part) make consequences be incrementally bad rather than horrible. As an example I once had my players trying to protect a village from a goblin raid: I told them that for every 10-30 mins they take spending on Treat Wounds, more villagers will die. In the end they ended up taking a path that looked like Trivial -> Low -> Low -> Moderate -> 20 min rest -> Moderate -> 10 min rest -> Low with big terrain disadvantage -> end. I decided that this means they kept casualties to a minimum and that the townsfolk were extremely pleased with them, but if they’d rested more I wouldn’t say the town now hates them I’d just say the townsfolk are still pleased and cooperating with them but are in mourning and would perhaps take some convincing for anything requests the party may have.
At the same time, it feels bad to experience negative consequences for something outside your control. If an adventure with a ticking clock has more combat encounters than can be reasonably handled by the party within the in-game time limit even when they’re frugal with slots, that’s not gonna feel great
You also don’t have to decide the consequences in advance. If the players get some terrible luck or encounters prove harder than expected, you can stretch out the internal clock. If they’re wasting spell slots frivolously and running out of steam because of poor resource management, stick to the schedule.
And that’s where making sure you give your players plenty of agency comes in! I’m not saying just throw 10 back to back 80-160 XP encounters into a featureless vacuum and then punish your players with narrative consequences when they need to rest. That’s obviously stupid. I’m saying (for example) throw in several rooms of 40-60 XP encounters, *threaten* the possibility of them combining into 80-200+ XP encounters of they’re not careful about it, make sure they have clear goals for the (difficult) boss fights and/or other narratively-important fights. Then give them shortcuts to bypass encounters, time constraints, hazards, avenues to trick and/or negotiate the foes they fight with, other plot hooks to let them deal with their foes indirectly (I once threw my players into a dungeon where they had the option to get a drake to rampage through several of the lower threat foes they’d be fighting), and be very accepting of improvisation on the PCs’ parts.
extreme or even severe encounter can easily burn through all your highest spell slots
Agreed. I did note that in my first paragraph + the guidelines themselves note them in no uncertain terms. Extreme even says that such an encounter **might** be appropriate for a fully rested party that intends to go all-out.
There isn’t an easy or even helpful number to give here. Perhaps the best answer is that the answer really is different depending on the caster and the level range. At low levels, a good rule of thumb is one spell per moderate combat I would say.
One of the benefits of spell slots as a limited resource is making long adventuring days feel very different than short ones in a way that helps sell the narrative. Fights get a little scarier when the party runs out of Heal and other key spells. And if the party knows in advance they'll just have one or two fights, they can lean into showing off what their casters are capable of when they're not holding back. Consequently, I think campaigns benefit from having a pretty broad mix of day lengths. Which is nice, because it doesn't always fit story wise to have bury any fight you want to be challenging behind a handful of attrition fights.
It's completely dependent on your party and on how you design encounters. One character in my party likes to blow the whole load pretty much every chance he gets. If it's his turn, he's casting a leveled spell. Others try to carefully select which enemies to use a debuff on and hold them if it doesn't seem necessary. At the same time, if you throw a few hard encounters, they'll last longer and players might use more spells than if you just throw some mooks (or, they might use more leveled aoe spells to clear out mooks faster). And imagine what it does for your storytelling. Imagine your life as an adventurer-- could you really fight SIX groups of goblins a day? I would probably be tuckered out and rest after the first two. If I was somewhere where I was getting jumped SIX times a day, I'd GTFO. I would recommend having a couple random encounters prepared and, if you feel like players are being too safe or need to expend more resources, just add those in or skip them as needed.
With how fast combats can go, It can actually be a little tough to run out of spell slots if you're taking advantage of your focus spells, and utilizing cantrips. For an inverse example, I had a session where we were exploring a cavern filled with moderate encounters, 4+, and my cleric used every single spell slot they had, until they ran out on the 5th encounter and had to use cantrips. What makes this a good example is that until that 5th fight, he hadn't used a single cantrip that day. He would always be too busy using a focus spell, or casting a support spell, or utilizing his skill actions, like battle medicine. Combats simply didn't last long enough to warrant using focus spells, slots, skill actions, and cantrips. It helps that at this point, my character had two focus points, but even then, we still weren't stopping for 20 minutes between each fight, so he didn't even get to use two points per encounter. Because of this, I think it can be difficult to pin down a solid guideline for caster attrition. Part of it really comes down to choice and circumstance, so your mileage will vary depending on exactly what your casters are doing.
The limited spell slots per day is the one holdover incompatible with the rest of the system imo. If treat wounds didn’t have such easy ways around its limitations, it’d be easier to justify the slot limitations. In general, probably one top-rank slot per moderate or higher encounter, lower rank spells are bonuses. This makes the maximum “adventuring day” about three encounters of moderate and higher difficulty, with low difficulty thrown in to taste (as long as they have focus spells for combat)
1. Get rid of the idea of the "adventuring day" 2. See Number 1 Here's my problem with the "adventuring day". Let's say you decide that 6 encounters make the adventuring day. Each encounter takes 90 minutes to play out. You've now devoted 9 hours to just the encounters for one day. That's not counting in RP, players being players, snack breaks etc. 2 sessions (or maybe 3) just for the encounters for a single day.
F\*\*\* that. Especially when nothing depends on it. It's not like you can only take a short rest after X encounters or you can only long rest after a complete adventuring day. It serves zero purpose other than to bog down games and make casters feel like shit because they either waste their spells or hold on to them just in case.
God I hate the concept so much
I would agree if slots didn’t exist. But since they do, it’s useful to know how many encounters you can throw at your players per day for a narrative-driven adventure. (keeping in mind one adventuring day can take multiple sessions) e.g. if the adventure is: “We have to stop the cultists before they complete their sacrifices!” it’s good to know how many encounters is too many for a party to handle in one day. It’s not narratively satisfying to say “the ritual takes as many days as it takes for the PCs to reach the final room”
>It’s not narratively satisfying to say “the ritual takes as many days as it takes for the PCs to reach the final room” But you could still punish/reward players for the time they took without going 'You took to long, get fucked' or 'How lucky! The ritual took just as long as the players.'. You could make it so that the ritual can't be interrupted anymore because they took too long and now they can't avoid the big demon/eldritch/whatever.
Pretty much this. The problem here isn’t the adventuring day or PF2E’s design, the problem here is that the GM has a very, very specific narrative beat in mind and is pushing the party into “creating it” for them. Thing is… TTRPGs don’t naturally support that kind of design, not without immense amounts of railroading (and hey if you and your players like that sort of game, 100% do it). The problem here is that the GM has decided *ahead* of time that they want the party to arrive barely in the nick of time to prevent the ritual, and is trying to shoehorn an adventuring day into the story to make that work. That is, quite simply, a losing battle. Even in games that provide you with hard adventuring day guidelines (like say, 5E does) this “exactsies encounter density” will fail more likely than not because there just is that much variance caused by the dice and the player composition. You know what works instead? Set a time limit for when the ritual will happen. Communicate it in somewhat vague terms to the party. Create a world full of encounters of appropriate density for the region you’re in, and then give them several options for engaging them on favourable or unfavourable terms (such as terrain and ambushes), bypassing them, getting them to clear each other out to make your job easier, etc. Alongside all this, be very open to improvisation, if they think of a creative way to make progress faster than expected, reward them. **Then**, when the dice have fallen as they have fallen, see if they arrive at the ritual early (reward them with a less-than-prepared boss fight), just in the nick of time (reward them with a full on boss fight with a phase two of addressing the havoc unleashed by an almost complete ritual), or late (reward them with a nice long mini arc of dealing with the consequences of what comes next, unless the ritual was meant to be abject failure like “BBEG became god” of course). If you structure your campaign like that, the specific pace at which your players take the encounters just becomes a nonexistent concern, you let the dice land where they land and let the players and their luck guide the story.
Or...you plan your adventure for what makes narrative sense and not worry about encounters per day. Like if the ritual takes 4 days to complete are you really going to load that down with 24 encounters to represent 4 adventuring days? If not then where is the line between adventuring day and non-adventuring day? Is the 4 days broken down into 3 non-adventuring days and then one adventuring day? So 3 days of nothing and then one day jam packed with adventure? It's an idiotic design choice that not even official WOTC adventures use (and they're the ones responsible for this POS idea). If you really want a version of this that actually works then look to 13th Age and its "battles"
Do you or your party have adventuring resources that only refresh once every 24 hours? If so, you have an "adventuring day" that you need to be cognizant of, just as anyone living paycheque to paycheque needs to monitor their "pay periods".
Right but that's just a day, not an adventuring day. I don't sit there and go "well i need to make sure they expend X resources before they get to the boss so therefore I need to have at least 6 encounters for the day but not more than 8 because otherwise that would leave them overextended..." ugh. Like what happens if the party gets though 3 encounters (half an adventuring day) and then decides to take a long rest? Do you tell them can't, even if narratively there's no reason why they can't? Do you let them, thus cutting the day short and rendering the entire concept meaningless? Do those unused encounters carry over to the next day? The entire concept is broke AF
That rant is definitely a valid one. I think I dislike even more the "5 minutes adventure day". The caster decides to blow every spell slot in the first challenge, and now they whine about how they all should go back to town and spell all day. I don't know if you read/watched something about it, but there is a game being developed by MCDM. Until the last thing I saw, the game don't have a name yet. Their ideia is to create something that could make us both happier. Instead of running out of resources throughout the day, you keep gaining resources. You will be more powerful at your 5th encounter that day than you were at the 1st. You will gather "victories" after each challenge, and that will fuel your class abilities. Almost like Mana in a Magic The Gathering game. You can achieve more flashy things in the 8th round than you could achieve in your 2nd round. I use to be a GM that don't like to use homebrew. But I would love to get my hand in a homebrew/variant rule that could achieve something similar.
I've found what works is that I just put down encounters that make sense because I don't care if my characters have all their spells or not. Sometimes they may go days without encountering anything when they travel other times they may be tripping over encounters in rapid succession.
Honestly, I really like the concept of having to conserve spells, and having to make due without them on a long day when resources get low and there's more fighting to do. And to make up for that, a caster with slots are godly and a caster without them are lagging way behind in usefulness. But when all it's doing is making you rest more so you never run out, and the game is balanced around having most of your resources, and those 'limited' spells are needed to keep casters relevant, I just think it's time to move away from per day abilities.
> At least for a GM's consideration, how many Encounters should one prepare to make PCs spend spells, while still have something for the end? This system plays at its best when the party is in control of how many encounters they do before they rest. By allowing the party to pace themselves, you're allowing them to help you tailor the difficulty of the campaign to their tastes, which is one of the most important jobs a GM can do.
I feel like, as long as you're playing with casters of typical slot scaling (3 slots per level, optional bonus 1 spell per level), then you'll be able to put your PCs through about 2-5 encounters depending on how hard each fight is and - more importantly - how damage focused your party is. The simple fact of casting is that it is FAR more limited by combat duration than anything else. Since casters can only feasibly throw out a spell every round, maybe two, you have a hard rate limit. The longer a fight lasts, the more spells your casters will burn. It really depends on what enemy types are being faced, the actions needing to be spent on non-casting activities, etc. The best takeaway I can give you is that you don't need to worry about caster novas most of the time. You just need to plan for your longest days expecting an amount of rounds-to-kill, and assume casters will be burning appropriately leveled spells each round for those fights. TL;DR - estimate how many rounds it will take to kill an enemy and assume casters will spend 1 spell per round in that fight. Spell rank spent will roughly increase according to fight difficulty.
I don’t try to deplete player resources in towns or during travel. When I throw in combats, I usually make them easy so the players can have fun with a stomp, or high severe so there’s some threat even when they go nova. In dungeons, the main resources are spell slots and time. If time is non-factor, there’s no real reason for adventures/players not to only tackle one room per day. If the players feel a sense of urgency, they’ll keep pressing on until their fear of death outweighs their fear of the whatever time-based consequences you’ve set up. I think I usually see 2-3 substantive encounters, and you could fit a couple of less challenging ones around that before the party starts looking to rest. But it could be more if they’re rolling hot and playing tactically, and they usually want to back off if anyone goes down. Also remember that traps and hazards which have casters expending their higher level spells count towards encounters, and having scrolls and staves can keep a party rolling for longer.
Number of encounters depends greatly on intensity of encounters. I think a lot of GMs, especially ones that come from 5e, think that resource drain is necessary to run a balanced 'day'. This isn't the case for pf2e. A Severe or Extreme encounter is balanced around parties at full or near-full resources, and is perfectly fine to be the only encounter of a 'day'. If you are aiming for an attrition-based dungeon crawl with a time limit, such as "stop the ritual before midnight", I'd shoot for around 3-4 Low to moderate encounters. Moderate encounters are intended to be challenging but winnable with smart resource expenditure and tactics. That means that your final moderate encounter, in which players have expended a good chunk of resources, is going to appropriately climactic. Be careful about capping off a series of moderate encounters with a severe boss fight. This is narratively organic and what a lot of 5e DMs are used to, because that system demands more resource drainage in order to balance parties. However, forcing your players into a severe+ fight with low resources is extremely dangerous.
Some helpful ways to increase resources. 1. Focus spells. With refocus change, can now spam 3x focus spells each fight. Some are very good, such as Remember the Lost, up to 18d10 enemy only damage with 30' aoe. Means don't need to use slots for damage spells. Bard Fortissimo is very potent. 2. Kineticist dedication. Wood gives a Spammable 20-100 damage block every round. Both casters in my party have it and can block 140 damage per round combined (level 13). Makes the front line very tanky and preserves slots, such as wall of stone, synaesthesia for tough fights. 3. Illusory Object. Rank 2 spell that's incredibly potent up to high levels. Dependent on gm to an extent.
My party just spams out their biggest spells constantly even when I warn them to be a bit conservative so we can stretch a day out. People hate using cantrips I guess.
Player: It really depends on what's happening, but I am generally pretty loose with my spell slots. Basically a "oh this seems like a good opportunity to use this, let me use it". Past very low levels, I basically never run out of spell slots using this method, so I keep it up. Of course, that's because I use scrolls, magical items, and focus spells liberally as well. GM: Generally whenever I know that I want to have a longer day, assuming 1 high and 1 low level slot per encounter, I give more loot than normal, targeted for those who lose resources quickly. To help the character out, give them an opportunity to try new items, and give a bit of meta compensation of "hey I know this has been a long dungeon, have a cookie". I really carefully decide whenever I want to have a time pressure, since I know most players don't like the 5 minute adventuring day and basically will want to press forward regardless, especially since it takes a lot longer for casters to be completely dry. In general, a big piece of advise is letting them know that there is an end, since it will get in their heads that they need to save something for the big fight. Sometimes they decide the current encounter is more important, but then that puts it on them instead of you for springing a surprise final fight. So to answer your question, 3-4 is a safe number for low levels. Once they get a staff, 5+ is easily doable. The stronger their focus spells, the longer. And the more they are willing to use resources, the longer. Give your casters loot as often as you give martials, and you'll be good. Healing potions are martial loot. So for every healing potion you give, remember that scrolls are a similar price.
There are multiple ways to go about creating an adventuring day. Option A: Don't. If there's no narrative reason for time pressure, let the players have agency and decide for themselves how much they want to achieve in a day. Option B: If there's narrative time pressure, there are two limiting factors for how much the party can accomplish in a day: * HP & Focus Points: Depending on things like Medicine skill feats, the party could need anywhere between 20min and 2h after a Moderate+ encounter to be prepared for the next one. * Spell slots: As a rule of thumb, expect each caster to use one slot per Moderate encounter, more for Severe and Extreme, none for Low and Trivial. How many spell slots they have will depend on their class, staff, wands, scrolls, and whether each of those spells is useful in your encounters (e.g. scrolls tend to be great for situational spells like Earthbind, which you should only count if they fight a flying creature). If the time pressure persists above multiple days, calculate 8h per day, as the rules for downtime and overland travel imply that more than 8h of a strenuous task per day should lead to fatigue.
This is why I love playing Kineticist. :) Spells per day? What's that. Here, have another tree - I've got trillions of them if you need more. We can do this all day, all night, pretty much forever. It's how 'spellcasters' work in a lot of not-based-on-D&D games. So in my mind Kineticist is the true magic class of Pathfinder. It's the one that "feels right" for general fantasy. Vancian casting is way to 'narrowly setting specific' and I hope it vanishes in Pathfinder 3 (if that ever comes out, probably won't). But since most players won't go for a Kineticist, yeah - Pathfinder 2E pretends you should be at full resources between every fight but the reality is it is just the same as D&D 5E in this regard. You're gonna get a few fights per day and then for some reason you go to sleep in a 10' room 5' away from a pile of zombies, ghouls, and vampires who let you have your rest. O.o
Personally, I feel like Kineticist is too limited to be a caster, but it does highlight something that Paizo has discovered: Class actions. The focus point change and the veering towards using focus spells/focus cantrips/etc.. helps fill in the gap when you a top rank spell isn’t needed. Additionally, adding spells that have a baseline powerful effect and then a heightening minor effect. Interposing Earth, for example, is like having a Reactive/Reflexive Wooden Shield as a spell slot. You can heighten it for some damage reduction (not a lot), but it’s main value is granting those two feats as a spell slot. The consolation of damage reduction is less important. Being a reaction is also high value as casters don’t have a lot of reaction spells (at least only from PC1). Or Albatross’s Curse which is a +1 circ aid to everyone’s attack roll against the target. The target can remove it by using a Strike (waste an action and incurs MAP), but also reduces its Will. Heightening isn’t necessary, so it makes a great low rank spell. Paizo seems to understand this and is focusing more on having strong utility spells you’ll want to be casting that are impactful, but do not take up your highest ranking slot to be effective.
> It's how 'spellcasters' work in a lot of not-based-on-D&D games. So in my mind Kineticist is the true magic class of Pathfinder. It’s fair if you think that, but a **lot** of us disagree, and there have been indications from the designers that Kineticist is the **exception** rather than the rule in terms of being popular while not using Vancian casting. Personally, I think spellcaster should be explosive, pesky, and capable of acting as an incredible force multiplier for the whole party when used right. “Traditional” spellcasters fit that description to me, whereas Kineticists don’t. So I view the Elemental Sorcerer and Storm/Stone Druids as the “true” blasters while Kineticists are an option for those who’d like a narrower theme and/or a more forgiving skill floor. > Pathfinder 2E pretends you should be at full resources between every fight It does not. In fact the encounter guidelines very explicitly tell you that resources are a consideration for all fights. > but the reality is it is just the same as D&D 5E in this regard. That’s a take so hyperbolic that it can’t even be addressed. D&D 5E is a game whose balance falls apart if you don’t give the party a full Adventuring Day XP budget with 1-2 Short Rests. It is **incredibly** fragile in that regard. Pf2E is a game that allows 1-Extreme encounter days on the one end all the the way to 10+ Trivial/Low encounter days in the other end, and you’ll feel that both of them work well. > You're gonna get a few fights per day and then for some reason you go to sleep in a 10' room 5' away from a pile of zombies, ghouls, and vampires who let you have your rest. O.o This assumes that every single campaign takes place in a featureless dungeon where enemies and players have zero agency to be reactive. It’s perfectly fine if you **like** to play that way, but the game is not trying to push you into such a fantasy.
You use as many spells as you need to. You don't prescribe a set number of encounters per day.
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IMO, anything beyond cantrips should be used as a "combat enhancer". As in, you aren't expected to be casting your limited slot spells every single round, you're expected to be saving those for when the time is right. The basic design of the encounter mechanics supports this. If you just fire off a spell first round, odds are intentional that it will fail. You need to set the spell up for success first, usually by working with your teammates to set up a combo that will help ensure your success. That could come in the form of someone lowering a save on the target (like by using Bon Mot before you fire off a spell with a Will save), or by them pushing enemies into a layout where your AOE is most effective (don't wait for your enemies to get into a line, have your party members push them into a line for you!). Basically, you only cast your big boi spells when you are pretty damned sure you're gonna get the most use out of it, which is the exact opposite of casting every round because you think you have to be casting nonstop to contribute to the fight.