Balesir
Adventurer
Agreed - but that doesn't really have anything to do with healing surges, as such. Call a "short rest" over night and an "extended rest" a week of game time (or a month, or a week per surge spent), and you get this effect. It all takes place in a few minutes of real time, anyway - the game time lag is basically just colour (with possible off-camera plot implications). I think DDN just needs to set up a "dial" for this colour; get the scaling of what refreshes with a "short" rest and what refreshes with an "extended" rest right - get it working well as a game - and then let each game group decide what "game time tempo" they want to use for themselves.There is nothing - repeat, nothing - wrong with a party taking several days or even a few weeks (or even a few months if there's lots of travel involved) in game time to get through an adventure; most of which time is spent resting.
Meh - clerics never "had to" save spells for healing; they were just sort-of expected to in order to (a) let the rest of the party play properly and (b) stop the game being broken in 3.x. If you were able to turn a blind eye to this sort of shenanigans and just roll with it, it worked fine - otherwise, the strings and the machinery behind the curtain became disconcertingly visible.Or, as an alternative, there's also nothing wrong with having the healers use their spells to - horrors! - heal rather than to do other things (I think this is a lot of what broke the Cleric in 3e - they didn't need to save their spells for healing so instead could become buff machines).
To me, healing surges are better because the capacity to heal is where it fits best - with the "patient" being healed - and the "healer" is just a catalyst for the process. The resource management is still there, but now it scales to the number of characters in the party and is a game everyone gets to play. The healer still gets to be a helpful catalyst to speed when the resource can be spent - and maybe even has some "bonus" resource to add into the pot for any "patient" of their choice - but doesn't have to be the sole source of fast recovery for however many there are in the team.
Whether the healing can be done in combat is a taste thing. I think it adds an extra dimension to the tactical game, but to those who either want a simpler tactical game, or who just don't want a tactical game at all, I can see that it's not helpful. An area for "modularity" to apply, maybe.