Healing in Combat

[pemerton]

4E said, ok, fine, healing people is something you do that doesn't consume your other resources, or even your main action! This also sounded elegant, especially as the second wind mechanic gave people a reason to play without a cleric. However, what this did instead was just give everyone a great big hitpoint buffer. Your HP in combat were really your HP + some quantity depending on how many leaders you had. Healing was more of an automatic, twice a fight I gotta make sure the fighter is still standing, kind of thing (and indeed, became bizarrely encouraged once leader abilities added riders to being healed).

The encouragement of in-combat healing in 4e isn't "bizarre" within the logic of 4e's design - it's part of the overall pacing of 4e combat, which is (roughly) that the monsters/NPCs start strong and hit hard, but the PCs bounce back by drawing on the depth of their resources (powers, action points, healing surges).

In-combat healing is one significant part of that dynamic.

I thin kfor long combats to be tenseful and engaging, they need a threat of death. In a game with ablative hit points like D&D, that requires a lot of yo-yoing the health - which in turn means mid-combat healing. Otherwise you plink away hit points for so long and pressure is only felt at the very end

Yes. Ablative hit points lost in only modest doses per combat make for boring play, unless those combats are quick and subordinate to some other focus of play.

either accept that "wearing down" is a goal of some play or it isn't. If it is, then individual challenges need to be not so tough, because the point is not to be in real danger of getting killed, but losing a few hit points before the next fight.

<snip>

What you can't have with D&D healing is the pretense that "every fight is serious business" and at the same time the party goes into a big dungeon or wilderness trek where they may have fight after fight, but not "bounce back" healing. They "wear down" or they don't.

I think this is correct. And it raises the question, what is the point of "wearing down" combats? As in, in what way are they supposed to be fun?

I think part of the problem is the increasingly casual attitude players have (3.x and 4e particularly) to having their characters go into negatives.

<snip>

if players were encouraged to be more conservative with their character's hit points (by creating a genuine fear of going into negatives rather than practically embracing it), there would be less hit points needed to be healed, and thus those times where hit points are restored become more crucial and thus dramatic. This promotes less need for in-combat healing.

I think you need to ratchet down the challenge of an encounter though to reflect this core change in attitude regarding combat and diving into the negatives. This is due to the challenge being staying out of the negatives rather than just avoid death.

Or perhaps it would encourage solving problems without using the combat first approach.

I think there is a deep mechanical incoherence in a game where the PC build rules, the action resolution rules, the encounter designe rules, etc, all focus on combat as the principal site of conflict resolution - and the game then says (or tries to say) "By the way, if you get into combat you're doing it wrong."

The way to have less combat in an RPG is to make something else the mechanical focus of play.

 

[Herremann the Wise]

I think part of the problem is the increasingly casual attitude players have (3.x and 4e particularly) to having their characters go into negatives.

<snip>

if players were encouraged to be more conservative with their character's hit points (by creating a genuine fear of going into negatives rather than practically embracing it), there would be less hit points needed to be healed, and thus those times where hit points are restored become more crucial and thus dramatic. This promotes less need for in-combat healing.

I think you need to ratchet down the challenge of an encounter though to reflect this core change in attitude regarding combat and diving into the negatives. This is due to the challenge being staying out of the negatives rather than just avoid death.

Or perhaps it would encourage solving problems without using the combat first approach.

I think there is a deep mechanical incoherence in a game where the PC build rules, the action resolution rules, the encounter designe rules, etc, all focus on combat as the principal site of conflict resolution - and the game then says (or tries to say) "By the way, if you get into combat you're doing it wrong."

The way to have less combat in an RPG is to make something else the mechanical focus of play.

I'm surprised that you find the ideas I presented so incoherent. I'm not saying that combat is not important or that it should be relegated to the backseat; just that if the best solution to every situation is through combat, then the game has probably over-focused (become too coherent perhaps?) Particularly when the aim of 5e is the whole three pillars thing. In such a case, does it not make sense to have the players at least consider the thought that combat may occasionally be an inefficient use of resources?

Best Regards
Herremann the Wise

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I'm surprised that you find the ideas I presented so incoherent. I'm not saying that combat is not important or that it should be relegated to the backseat; just that if the best solution to every situation is through combat, then the game has probably over-focused (become too coherent perhaps?) Particularly when the aim of 5e is the whole three pillars thing. In such a case, does it not make sense to have the players at least consider the thought that combat may occasionally be an inefficient use of resources?

Best Regards
Herremann the Wise

I think pemerton is trying to say: If non-combat options are supposed to be important in a game, then the game also needs to show a mechanical focus on it.

If combat has 30 pages of rules and non-combat 2, or if resolving a combat takes 3o minutes but resolving a non-combat situation 5 minutes, then it is easy to assume that the game is mostly about combat.

 

[Shadeydm]

I think part of the problem is the increasingly casual attitude players have (3.x and 4e particularly) to having their characters go into negatives. There is no fear of becoming unconscious; 4e practically assumes it as part of its massive safety net. My point is, if players were encouraged to be more conservative with their character's hit points (by creating a genuine fear of going into negatives rather than practically embracing it), there would be less hit points needed to be healed, and thus those times where hit points are restored become more crucial and thus dramatic. This promotes less need for in-combat healing.


Best Regards
Herremann the Wise

The whole purpose of the defender role in 4E is to take hits meant for your teammates this virtually dictates that people playing defenders will be taking lots of damage and therefore seeing and embracing negative hitpoints. When my fighter or swordmage went down in a battle I knew and often said aloud it was because i did my "job". This dictates a significant shift in playstyle from the earliest editions of the game. Hopefully this won't be the default assumption of 5E.

 

[Kraydak]

Go back to 1e for a different perspective yet again! In 1e/2e, there was Cure Light Wounds as a 1st level spell (2nd for druids in 1e, but druids were weird in a lot of ways, including their spell progression), and Cure Serious Wounds as a 4th level spell (Cure Crit at 5th, Heal at 6th, but 1e/2e didn't really go there). Neither scaled with level. You could not load a lower level spell in a higher level slot. Healing potions were NOT cheap commodities.

The results: the HP available in a fight were mostly the HP you brought into it. In combat healing was about keeping focus-fired targets alive, little more. This had some nice effects: you did not expect to heal up completely between fights. You couldn't. If you did, every little random encounter would require that you burn a Cure or two, and then sleep. At the same time, it made "walk-over" fights important. Sure, maybe the fight only did 10 damage to one of the fighters, who had 80 HP, BUT it would cost 2 Cure Lights to heal, out of 6 across the entire party. By constraining available healing SO much, you remove the 15 minute work-day by making it simply non-functional. You also free the Cleric from healing 24/7. Their healing was vital, but simply not available in a quantity which let them do it every (or even most) round of combat. This also means that you avoided Healing-Escalation. If the Cleric *can* provide huge amounts of healing, then encounters need to inflict huge amounts of damage to be stressful, which then requires that the Cleric *does* provide the healing.

In short: "fixing" the "heal-bot" aspect of Clerics by making healing cheap and easy just means that encounters expand to consume all the available healing. Instead, fix it by throttling healing, especially in combat. Throttling healing outside of combat mainly mitigates against the 15-minute work-day, but also makes low-level encounters significant. Which is a good thing. Such encounters give characters a chance to show off their high level power.

 

[ExploderWizard]

I think part of the problem is the increasingly casual attitude players have (3.x and 4e particularly) to having their characters go into negatives. There is no fear of becoming unconscious; 4e practically assumes it as part of its massive safety net. My point is, if players were encouraged to be more conservative with their character's hit points (by creating a genuine fear of going into negatives rather than practically embracing it), there would be less hit points needed to be healed, and thus those times where hit points are restored become more crucial and thus dramatic. This promotes less need for in-combat healing.

This is a huge issue. The idea that any healing begins at 0 hp actually encourages players to let characters go down before healing them.

Anything between -X and 0 is a "free" hp resource. Since there are no bad consequences for letting yourself get to deaths door before healing then why not take advantage of that pool?

I really think the rules for healing/recovery need to be changed once 0 hp and below has been reached. If there is any in combat healing to be done then it should be crucial that it only be effective as long as the recipient has at least one hp.

Going down in a combat should be devastating and meaningful not just a casual indication that its time to apply healing. Assuming 1 hp means full effectiveness and 0hp or less means out of commission, then treating damage differently at these levels makes sense, and can be done without having to redefine anything.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

This is a huge issue. The idea that any healing begins at 0 hp actually encourages players to let characters go down before healing them.

Anything between -X and 0 is a "free" hp resource. Since there are no bad consequences for letting yourself get to deaths door before healing then why not take advantage of that pool?

I really think the rules for healing/recovery need to be changed once 0 hp and below has been reached. If there is any in combat healing to be done then it should be crucial that it only be effective as long as the recipient has at least one hp.

Going down in a combat should be devastating and meaningful not just a casual indication that its time to apply healing. Assuming 1 hp means full effectiveness and 0hp or less means out of commission, then treating damage differently at these levels makes sense, and can be done without having to redefine anything.

Every round you are lying on the ground and not working to kill some foe is wasted. Sure, you get some more healing out of it, but you also didn't get to deal 15 to 30 points of damage, and your team mates may instead suffer another 10-20 points of damage from NPC. You'd really need to get almost negative bloodied to make it worth while.

n short: "fixing" the "heal-bot" aspect of Clerics by making healing cheap and easy just means that encounters expand to consume all the available healing. Instead, fix it by throttling healing, especially in combat. Throttling healing outside of combat mainly mitigates against the 15-minute work-day, but also makes low-level encounters significant. Which is a good thing. Such encounters give characters a chance to show off their high level power.

I have to disagree though - if you don't have more than 6 healing spells to patch you up, there is every reason to go nova and go home. Because you're running out of hit points anyway. The difference is that everyone will feel tapped, not just the spell-casters while the Fighter and Rogue just need to suck another Wand of Cure Light Wounds dry.

 

[Chris_Nightwing]

Every round you are lying on the ground and not working to kill some foe is wasted. Sure, you get some more healing out of it, but you also didn't get to deal 15 to 30 points of damage, and your team mates may instead suffer another 10-20 points of damage from NPC. You'd really need to get almost negative bloodied to make it worth while.

Most parties can arrange their turns so that the frontliners act, then the monsters, then the healers. They're definitely encouraged to take as much damage as possible into negative (without dying) before getting healed. Back in 2nd/3rd edition, I remember -10 being a seriously scary threshold. It made you want healing pretty swiftly if you were in single digit HP.

Either way, I think that once you run out of HP you should stop counting. You are at 0, and dying, and I think that you should start taking some serious and more permanent penalty if you don't get attended to damned quickly. Death saves were too lenient! I'm thinking the *permanent* loss of a hitpoint for every turn you lay dying.

 

[ExploderWizard]

Every round you are lying on the ground and not working to kill some foe is wasted. Sure, you get some more healing out of it, but you also didn't get to deal 15 to 30 points of damage, and your team mates may instead suffer another 10-20 points of damage from NPC. You'd really need to get almost negative bloodied to make it worth while.

I'm not talking about staying down for rounds. Say you have 5 hp left and the enemy hits for 18-26 damage. The cleric could use healing word giving you back 12 +1d6, leaving you with 18-23 hp, or just wait until you get dropped gaining the benefit of that negative pool and the chance that you might be missed.

The point is that standing someone up from -15 to full fighting effectiveness is too easy and turns ALL hp damage that doesn't kill outright into superhero stun points.

I have to disagree though - if you don't have more than 6 healing spells to patch you up, there is every reason to go nova and go home. Because you're running out of hit points anyway. The difference is that everyone will feel tapped, not just the spell-casters while the Fighter and Rogue just need to suck another Wand of Cure Light Wounds dry.

Remember this is concerning editions that do not feature ubiquitous healing wands, potions, and scrolls. While a party may have some non-spell slot healing resources, they are precious and not replaceable at the general store.

The consequence of this is not to "go nova" but to give more thought about going into combat (making sure its worth it), and fighting smarter when combat does take place.

 

[pemerton]

I'm surprised that you find the ideas I presented so incoherent.

Your ideas aren't incoherent in themselves. For me, the incoherence is in the overall design picture that is presented.

A big part of the definition of a D&D PC is his/her combat capability. And a big part of the action resolution rules are combat resolution rules - this is especially true in the playtest, for example, which has virtually nothing else.

When the game looks like that, surely the combat rules are there to be used, aren't they?

In classic (pre-3E) D&D, it's true that some combats were meant to be avoided - namely, wandering monster fights. But there were action resolution rules to support this (reaction rolls and evasion checks). And the expectation was still that players would be taking their PCs into combat in due course, namely, against the placed monsters whose treasures they wanted to loot.

But (as I've posted in another thread recently) there are pressures on classic D&D that tend to push towards fighting even the wandering monsters - at the story level, if the reason for fighting the placed monsters is that they're wickd and dangerous, doesn't that rationale apply to the wandering ones too?, and at the metagame level, if combat is the most mechanical satisfaction that the game provides, then why willingly hold back?

The upshot of this sort of approach is the 2nd ed and 3E XP rules, which favour combat over treasure as a source of character advancement.

If players are meant to be doing something with their PCs other than fight, then it needs mechanics to support it. And (unlike the AD&D evasion and reaction mechanics, in my view at least) I think those mechanics should be interesting and exciting to engage. They should offer something like the same range of options - both at the story level and the mechanical play level - as does combat.

I don't think that you can achieve the goal of reducing combat as an attractive mechanical option simply by making the stakes higher (eg by limiting healing). That just sounds like a way to make it more exciting!

I'm not saying that combat is not important or that it should be relegated to the backseat; just that if the best solution to every situation is through combat, then the game has probably over-focused (become too coherent perhaps?)

If non-combat conflict resolution makes sense in story terms, and is mechanically attractive, then you won't need to worry about limiting healing.

And even if you do achieve this goal, if combat is still about hit point ablation, then hit point depletion will continue to be a significant feature of it. Even if you limit out-of-combat healing, you might still want liberal incombat healing in order to support the dynamics of exciting combat. For example, in 4e terms, you might keep everything the same but halve everyone's surges - suddenly, fewer combats per rest, but not necessarily an imperative to the 15 minute day if non-combat conflict resolution is foregrounded as a meaningful option.

Particularly when the aim of 5e is the whole three pillars thing. In such a case, does it not make sense to have the players at least consider the thought that combat may occasionally be an inefficient use of resources?

4e has a tendency to treat healing surges as a resource in non-combat resolution also, so you would have to think about that as part of your design of non-combat resolution.

But the other thing you would have to do is radically change the default GM advice and scenario design. D&D has always presented as the default stakes - both for combat and non-combat - "win or die". In combat, losers die. In social negotiations, losers die too (eg a bad reaction roll leads to attack, not the spreading of rude stories). When you fail a climb check, you fall and die (it's not just that you don't get to the top in time).

Nothing about the playtest suggests that the designers of D&Dnext are looking at changing this at all (the medusa encounter is where they might have shown a different trajectory, and they don't). While the stakes are always mortal ones, players will rationally enough always be ready to have their PCs resort to violence. When the action resolution rules are robust only when violence is resorted to, players will also rationally enough have their PCs default to violence. The net combination is a game in which one of the 3 pillars will predominate, in my view.

I think pemerton is trying to say: If non-combat options are supposed to be important in a game, then the game also needs to show a mechanical focus on it.

If combat has 30 pages of rules and non-combat 2, or if resolving a combat takes 3o minutes but resolving a non-combat situation 5 minutes, then it is easy to assume that the game is mostly about combat.

For reasons that got thrashed out in Hussar's old "Is D&D about combat" thread, I wouldn't go that far. I don't think the game you describe has to be about combat, because combat might be a means to the expression of something else.

But otherwise you are right about what I'm saying - if you want players to take non-combat options for conflict resolution seriously, you have to provide them, make them robust and not dependent upon GM fiat, and make the fun and worthwhile (ie not all stakes are "win or die").

I think Burning Wheel does a pretty good job of showing how you can do this in a fantasy RPG.