The Healing Paradox

[Uller]

As you said yourself, the problem is the DM, not the rules. So the DM has to fix it.

You're right...When the players see a rule that encourages them to have a 15 minute adventuring week rather than a 15 minute adventuring day and and that causes the DM to have to impose consequences that are lame, clearly it's the DM's fault and not the system.

 

[Derren]

You're right...When the players see a rule that encourages them to have a 15 minute adventuring week rather than a 15 minute adventuring day and and that causes the DM to have to impose consequences that are lame, clearly it's the DM's fault and not the system.

So a living world is lame compared to a random collection of dungeon rooms where time stands still unless the PCs do something?

A rule to prevent longer adventuring days is only needed when you play a boardgame or simple H&S game. But if you play a real RPG game there are nearly always setting reasons why you shouldn't take too long. And when the PCs still rest after every encounter, that is there decision.

 

[Fanaelialae]

And when the PCs still rest after every encounter, that is there decision.

IMO, that is where you are wrong. The ruleset can easily make that decision for the characters. For example, back when I played 3e, I played in a campaign where we had an unoptimized (but interesting) party and a DM who was of the school of thought that every encounter must be a challenge.

We rested after virtually every encounter not because we wanted to (I've played with these guys before and since, and given the option they will press on as far as is sensible and sometimes a little beyond), but because to do otherwise would have been suicidal.

Now, I'll grant you, if a level 5 party that faces a single goblin decides to rest because the wizard cast a magic missile, that's on them. (Personally, I've never seen such a thing.)

Typically IME, players decide to rest because they don't believe they have the resources to press on. That's not on the players. A choice of failure by time constraints (resting) vs failure via suicide (pressing on without any resources) is not a real choice at all. It's the system that determines how many resources the players are allotted and how quickly those are recovered. Therefore, it often hinges upon the system rather than the players.

 

[Fifth Element]

It is the old-style D&D healing which is clumsy and suspension-of-disbelief crushing by common standards.

This needs to be said more often. To me it was always something that had to be tolerated in order to enjoy the rest of the game. Clerical healing is kludgy and I find it very gamist.

 

[Tony Vargas]

The issue with 15 minute workdays and overnight healing is just a specific case of the problem with daily resources and pacing.

Different DMs and players want stories with different pacing. Some would like to have dozens of deadly encounters per day, others might want weeks to pass between encounters. If the game uses 'days' to recover resources, it forces pacing around days. In the long-term campaign, every encounter faces a full-resources party. The game isn't balanced around that, characters with daily powers become overpowered relative their daily-less companions, and encounters are underpowered for their intended level.

Resources should be moved from 'days' to a soft re-set based on desired campaign pacing. Maybe something like the 'milestone.' Every 4th encounter, you re-charge low-usage abilities (like Vancian spells) - or every 5th or 6th, whatever the design pegs as the balance point. Or, maybe something more 'story' oriented, like "chapters," with re-charging happening in the "denouement."

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

The "I DM a living world" argument cuts both ways.

The amount of bloodletting even a lazy party typically dishes out every day is so huge that it is not necessarily sensible for the survivors to do much about it (otherwise than just flee for the hills). Replacement monsters would not be expected to just respawn for the party's inconvenience at a high enough rate to matter.

The most likely to be effective countertactics would be to coordinate a deadly ambush or hunt down the resting party. The threat of both tactics argues for the party avoiding being weak as much as possible, as they always have to have enough resources for at least one (or two) more nasty pitched battle held in reserve.

 

[pemerton]

If hit points represent physical damage as well as exhaustion/luck, healing should do the same. So how about this.

Using mundane healing, including an extended rest, you can only heal up to half your max hit points. To top off, you'll need to use magical resources to go from full to max?

I don't see how this would deal with the OP's issue - it seems to make resting, to recover magical resources, more attractive. It also ties healing to gold (which presumably can be used to buy magical resources, as per 3E, or per the clerical spell casting list in the AD&D DMG), which makes balancing treasure harder rather than easier.

Players will not push forward with low hitpoints, because it risks death. They will push forward with minor penalties however, because they still have their hitpoint buffer before death.

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I would be happy for a rest to restore all HP and 1 wound.

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Healing of actual wounds would be a tactical choice - do you get rid of that -1 on a set of attacks/checks/saves or just cast bless to negate it (and provide a bonus to everyone else) in the short-term?

But why would we not just rest, recover that -1 penalty from resting, and memorise the Bless spell to get a further +1 buff?

In other words, where does the reason to keep going come from?

"Push on or rest up?" - That's the question every party and player will be facing and what I believe is the crux of the problem. The main issue is that there's no compelling gameplay reason to push on. There's often *story* reasons, but I believe there should be gameplay reasons as well.

<snip>

There really is no benefit to pushing on in any edition I've ever seen except 4e. Here we have action points every 2 encounters. "Well, we're low on dailies, but we've got action points... Should we push on?" Not exactly a balanced set of options but at least there's something on the other end of the scale for once.

I'm not saying D&D needs action points. But I will say D&D needs a reward system to balance the resource systems.

With my 4e group, I've found that action points, plus daily item abilities, plus some magic items keyed to milestones (eg the paladin has Meliorating Armour: +1 to AC per milestone) help reinforce the story reasons for pushing on. They are not enough on their own.

Another alternative is to tie character growth and progression (in D&Ds case, that's XP) into player-defined goals and beliefs. This is the mechanism used in the Burning Wheel.

Burning Wheel has another interesting mechanic that is relevant here: the "reward" for pushing on when wounded is that DCs become (relatively) harder to hit - because of wound penalties - and in that system you need to tackle (without necessarily succeeding at) hard DCs or you won't advance. So being wounded actually facilitates advancement at the same time that it makes failure more likley.

A further feature of Burning Wheel that helps make this work is that "failure" doesn't generally mean character death. It means unexpected complications, that the PC did not desire but that the player can probably derive enjoyment from.

Part of what creates the pressure towards healing in D&D, in my view, is not just the relative lack of reward for pushing on, but that the consequences of failure are generally so brutal. I think that if D&Dnext revisits the issue of consequences for failure, it could help address many issues: healing; making players more willing to use a range of stats in action resolution; making balancing PCs across the 3 pillars more viable; combining with flatter math to make more story elements more viable at more levels.

But there is no sign in the playtest that they are looking at this issue of consequences. The stakes in the Cave of Chaos still seem to be "succeed or die".

 

[pemerton]

So a living world is lame compared to a random collection of dungeon rooms where time stands still unless the PCs do something?

A rule to prevent longer adventuring days is only needed when you play a boardgame or simple H&S game. But if you play a real RPG game there are nearly always setting reasons why you shouldn't take too long.

Derren, you are fond of deriding those whose play experience is different from yours as hack-and-slashers etc, but your assertion doesn't make it so.

First, there is a fairly traditional D&D set-up - investigate and loot the long-lost tomb - in which "living world" is not going to make a big difference over a timescale of days or even weeks (maybe over months or years caves erode, new monsters move in, new hauntings arise, etc).

Second, even when dealing with living, reactive enemies, a day or two is often neither here nor there. Suppose that Han and Luke had taken an extra two days to rescue Leia - would it have made a big difference? Instead of being held prisoner for N days, she's held prisoner for N+2.

Upthread, [MENTION=386]LostSoul[/MENTION] canvassed a respawn time for the Caves of Chaos of 1d3 days. Mechanically that might work, but within the context of a living world, where are those extra bodies coming from? Why do the Caves of Chaos inhabitants not just sit on their "respawners" for a week or two and then conquer the world?

Within the confines of a genuine living world, as opposed to a very tightly constructed RPG scenario, I think that it is actually quite hard to make time matter to within a day or two (as opposed perhaps to weeks or months).

Which suggests a much more obvious solution, for those who do want time to matter within a living world - make the recovery period (for spells, hit points, surges etc) a week, or a month, rather than a day. Then the PCs will have to tackle the adventure on a single set of resources. (This still won't give LostSoul what he wants, though, of making resource recovery a strategic decision. I think that requires shorter timelines, and other factors to be at stake, of the sort [MENTION=6695556]Wexter[/MENTION] talked about.)

The amount of bloodletting even a lazy party typically dishes out every day is so huge that it is not necessarily sensible for the survivors to do much about it (otherwise than just flee for the hills). Replacement monsters would not be expected to just respawn for the party's inconvenience at a high enough rate to matter.

Yes.

Fairly recently, I ran a pretty typical set of encounters for my 4e group: fight some cultists, track them down to their headquarters and fight some more cultists, clean up in time for the dinner at the Baron's place where more cultists attack and are fought off, then go to the (now dead) cult leaders' house where wererats and bodyguards have to be fought off.

In D&D terms, this is a fairly typical adventuring day: 4 encounters. But because it was taking place in an urban environment, the bodycount felt more "real". Including the NPCs that the cultists killed, at the end of the day around 30 or so people had died in a town of about 5000 inhabitants. That is carnage on a pretty grand scale!

As a GM, my rationale for running the scenario at such a hectic pace is the recovery dynamics of 4e (ie the game is more interesting when the players have to make choices about resource use, which means I want the scenario to unfold within a given rest period); within the story, I based the hectic action around a prophecy and an astrological event.

But it's hardly the case that, had the scenario been slowed down (eg because I had put the pacing into the hands of the players, and they had in turn stopped to rest), that the cultists would have been able to recruit new members at the rate they were being killed off.

At best they might have fled.

 

[Stalker0]

Some great ideas being thrown around.

One thing I would caution when people are thinking of new healing ideas, you have to be careful not to rely on mechanics that may very well be optional to a group's experience.

For example, I've heard a few ideas regarding using XP as a way to better reinforce "pushing on". However, XP is a lot more optional than some would think. Some groups give XP very different than the standard methods, heck many groups (mine included) don't use it at all!

Since healing is a core aspect of the dnd experience (in some way shape or form depending on your dial preference), then it needs to interface with only the most core aspects of the game.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Burning Wheel has another interesting mechanic that is relevant here: the "reward" for pushing on when wounded is that DCs become (relatively) harder to hit - because of wound penalties - and in that system you need to tackle (without necessarily succeeding at) hard DCs or you won't advance. So being wounded actually facilitates advancement at the same time that it makes failure more likley.

For example, I've heard a few ideas regarding using XP as a way to better reinforce "pushing on". However, XP is a lot more optional than some would think. Some groups give XP very different than the standard methods, heck many groups (mine included) don't use it at all!

I've long thought that part of the problem in D&D is a reward cycle that insufficiently takes into account feedback from the players. Not "feedback" in the sense of the DM listening to them (which ought to happen in any case), but feedback in that as the situation changes, the party is encouraged to do more of what the game is about, albeit in different ways. Part of the reason is that you need a scale that can gradually move.

Hit points are supposed to function as such a feedback loop--and can in AD&D operational play once you get outside of low levels. Hit points, and way to get them back, are finite. But you want to not turn back until necessary, because time spent getting to and from the "dungeon" and/or dealing with wandering monsters is time not spent gaining treasure. So if you think about a big dungeon that requires multiple trips, when to turn back is more about efficiency than immediate death. You are tempted to push on, but you've also got a point at which pushing on is increasingly a bad idea.

So we've talked about various death spirals. And some of us have talked in the past about how you can't make the Burning Wheel mechanism work in D&D very well, because there really isn't any incentive for risking failure. And then if you try to do some kind of "more XP or treasure when you push on" mechanic, it often gets unwieldly.

So how about combining a death spiral wound system with bonuses to some positive thing? Let's say "fate points" for this example, and leave exactly what they do for later discussion. Suffice for now to say that having them is unmistakenly a good thing, but you only get them when you are suffering from the wounds (from the death spiral or otherwise). The more you suffer from the wounds, the more you are likely to get fate points. And critically, these fate points don't reset at the end of an adventure. They are a special kind of reward explicitly for pushing on in the face fo the death spiral--and they help you in ways that deal with being in a rough spot--whether you got there by pushing on or stumbled into it later.

Both the death spiral wound system and the fate point system can be modules, and work independently. Use the death spiral wound system by itself, you make the game more gritty and tough. Use the fate point system by itself, and you inject a minor player agency option that doesn't fire very much, because the players are seldom "wounded". Use them together, and you get something that changes the core game to keep it about the same tone, but rewards pressing on in the face of danger.