I really think they need to bring back longterm status ailments and other effects that last beyond long rests.
I hate status effects. They're obnoxious as both a player and a GM. They add yet another set of modifiers to keep track of when you're already juggling a half dozen NPCs, all wearing off or worsening at different rates. And even if you have a cleric, they're still a huge nuisance to deal with because
every single one requires a different spell to deal with. You can spontaneously cast cure spells to restore HP, but you'll still have to fill most of your spell slots with
remove disease, neutralize poison, remove curse, break enchantment, remove paralysis, restoration, remove blindness/deafness, stone to flesh, etc. If you didn't prepare the right one or you didn't prepare enough of them for when multiple people get hit or to restore all the ability damage then the adventuring day is done. Or you're burning cash on scrolls, wands and potions. Paizo devs refer to ability-draining monsters like Shadows as "anti-treasure" because they cost the party more than they're worth in loot or XP.
Saga Edition's condition track is about the limit of how much status effect I care to put up with.
Once inside the enemy base stopping for a rest should have the entire place on high alert from then on, making stealth or ambush based tactics nigh impossible.
I agree that it's narratively problematic to have players stopping to rest mid-adventure. Which is all the more reason to not make stopping to rest the central mechanic of your game by making most abilities use-per-day. If you do that, people are going to rest rather than carry on with depleted resources, especially when the resource that usually runs out first is healing, the one that keeps you alive.
Right, because noone ever played a cleric in 3e?
In my experience, people usually played a cleric because "somebody has to" rather than because they actually wanted to. When they were excited about playing a cleric, it was because of things other than healing, like the dwarf cleric casting
righteous might to become huge and smash things. Last couple campaigns I was in that
had a cleric, it was an NPC.
In most tabletop RPGs, a character or two might have a healing spell or skill, but I can't think of many that devote an entire party role to healing. Lots of the standard D&D tropes, like "constantly taking damage and getting healed," "having one player be a dedicated healer" and "grinding for loot," have been largely abandoned by tabletop gaming in the 21st century and become common tropes of MMORPGs instead.
It's generally supposed to be 4 not 3.
Unless you can't get five people together on a regular basis. You have as many players as you have. Having two PCs has been the norm for me for the last couple years. By using things like Mythic and Path of War to remove the need for spellcasters, a couple of badass martials can often clear multiple dungeons without needing to rest. It's fantastic.
Fuck this mentality, trapfinding should be a feat at best, heving it as class feature is just niche protection.
Only letting rogues find/disarm traps totally undercuts the usefulness of rangers and bards and other classes by not letting them properly fill the "skill-monkey" role.
I think just being trained in the appropriate skills should be all it takes to find and disarm traps. You should not need a feat or class ability to use a skill for it's most common purpose. Having a feat or class ability that enhances trapfinding is fine, but not to even make it possible in the first place. A class should be appealing enough that people want to play it without making it mandatory.
