D&D 5E 2/18/13 L&L column

[tuxgeo]

Ok. . . .

They've already introduced the "Healer's Kit" idea. What about just a simple, single entry in the equipment list:
Healer's Kit: This satchel includes various bandages, poultices, anesthetics and other useful materials for cleaning and treating various minor wounds. The Healer's Kit has enough material for 10 uses before needing to be restocked. Each use of the kit requires 10 minutes of uninterrupted time (if they call that a "turn" or a "short rest" or whatever, I do not care). Each use of the kit will heal 5 HP. Any class can purchase/use a Healer's Kit.

Done. Mundane healing for everyone.
1) It's a limited but renewable resource...cleric can use their spells for other things or keep one or two for "emergency" healing.
2) Puts a focus on the need for a secure area for a limited period of time to use the kit. So, no, you can't be almost dead in the middle of a fight and then POOF All bettuh! Let's keep fighting.
2a) Also puts a [much needed, imho] focus on the fact that if you're hurt/bleeding/losing/close to death...RUN AWAY! You don't have the guarantee of A) winning or B) a cleric to have a cure spell at the ready/waiting just for you.

Cleric's do not become "mandatory" because everybody can have their own personal kit...10 healings all their own until they need to restock. OR, a PC can opt not to and rely on the kindness of strangers or hope to find an occasional potion.

Sort of like that -- but each use of the kit should either "stabilize the dying" (as the Healer's Kit does in the January, 2013 playtest packet) or else heal 1 HP instead of 5 HP. Then if more healing is desired, the players and DM can agree to use the Hit Dice module. This allows there be different options for a wide range of tastes.

 

[I'm A Banana]

If healing isn't necessary, a "healer's kit" also isn't necessary. While an item would help spread out the burden of healing, we still have a problem where "you need a healer's kit," then.

The way to avoid asymmetric resource depletion isn't just through reactive HP-bumps. Remember, negating 1d8 points of damage and healing 1d8 points of damage are the same thing. Same with granting 1d8 temp HP, or, depending on the maths, something like a +2 bonus to AC. So if a cleric gets to heal 1d8 points of damage, say, twice a day, we just need to give everyone else some ability to do the same thing, even if it looks different.

So, Fighters get extra attacks in a round. Now, they can give up one of those attacks to completely deflect one attack against them.

So, Wizards get some spells. Mage Armor maybe gives you 1d8 temp HP.

So, Rogues get some tricks. Maybe they can get a Dodge trick that adds to their AC.

All of these things are the equivalent of a Cure Light Wounds spell. Most of them are pro-active, rather than re-active, but they're all mathematically identical.

If anyone here has played Guild Wars 2, they play a lot with different kinds of healing, and don't have a dedicated pure-healer kind of class (though several different classes can fill that role), nor do they have a real need for it. The mantra is that no one else is going to be able to keep you alive, and an addendum seems to be that pure HP-restoring is only the blandest kind of "healing" available.

Healing is under the umbrella of "defense," and there's a lot of ways to design a game where you can have pro-active defenses that mitigate the need for someone to heal you after the fact. In fact, personally, I really dig that play experience.

 

[Bedrockgames]

If healing isn't necessary, a "healer's kit" also isn't necessary. While an item would help spread out the burden of healing, we still have a problem where "you need a healer's kit," then.

The way to avoid asymmetric resource depletion isn't just through reactive HP-bumps. Remember, negating 1d8 points of damage and healing 1d8 points of damage are the same thing. Same with granting 1d8 temp HP, or, depending on the maths, something like a +2 bonus to AC. So if a cleric gets to heal 1d8 points of damage, say, twice a day, we just need to give everyone else some ability to do the same thing, even if it looks different.

So, Fighters get extra attacks in a round. Now, they can give up one of those attacks to completely deflect one attack against them.

So, Wizards get some spells. Mage Armor maybe gives you 1d8 temp HP.

So, Rogues get some tricks. Maybe they can get a Dodge trick that adds to their AC.

All of these things are the equivalent of a Cure Light Wounds spell. Most of them are pro-active, rather than re-active, but they're all mathematically identical.

If anyone here has played Guild Wars 2, they play a lot with different kinds of healing, and don't have a dedicated pure-healer kind of class (though several different classes can fill that role), nor do they have a real need for it. The mantra is that no one else is going to be able to keep you alive, and an addendum seems to be that pure HP-restoring is only the blandest kind of "healing" available.

Healing is under the umbrella of "defense," and there's a lot of ways to design a game where you can have pro-active defenses that mitigate the need for someone to heal you after the fact. In fact, personally, I really dig that play experience.

This is certainly a solution, but the problem is there are many gamers for whom the old "lose HP, get healed by the cleric or wait it out" is what they want. Part of my problem with how 4E was designed was that it tried to insert mechanical solutions to things that I considered to be issues of flavor and in-game realities. So while your solution certainly might work for a number of folks, to me it is going to feel like another mechanics-first effort to make the game play a particular way (whereas for me, I want to play around things like HP loss and needing magical heals).

 

[Obryn]

The wand of cure light wounds is kind of a strawman, a theorical possibility. Ok it is very possible it showed up on some games and some groups, but if at character creation you just make a healbot (like the cleric, bard, favored soul or even better the healer) and make it known, those won't show up if you don't speciffically craft them/buy them and even then it is you as the party healer who brought those into play (unless the DM or party rogue just wants to act mean to you, but that is a table issue).

They were pretty much the norm in all of my 3.x games from about 2002 or so, onwards. My cleric players usually didn't want to be healbots, and the healstick enabled them to do other stuff.

It was only mostly absent in my Arcana Evolved games, and that's because healing spells were a lot less potent in general.

-O

 

[stoloc]

The game already has nonmagical healing, doesn't it? The hit dice mechanic?

From the way I read it they are seriously considering removing the HD mechanic from core.

 

[Nikosandros]

Didn't 4e show how to solve this particular problem, via surge-dependent healing?

Surges are one of the best innovations in 4e IMO, but unfortunately they get a lot of hate and, sadly, I think that there is no chance of seeing them in Next.

The idea that healing is proportional to the character hit points is logical and prevents ridiculous situations in which a wizard is easily fully healed while the might barbarian must sleep a couple of months back at the inn. Limited surges per day prevent the very annoying CLW issue, and allow both "leader-enabled healing" and self-healing.

 

[Chris_Nightwing]

I support the healer's kit idea, but I would describe its use more as 'First Aid' - and it can thus only be used once per person during a short rest. If you want to give Clerics their healing niche, let them magically enhance this so that more HP is restored - useful when you only get to recover once per combat.

 

[Klaus]

IMHO, signs of trouble are:

- Someone feels pressured to play a cleric.
- The party stocks up on potions of healing.
- The party wants to buy/craft wands of cure light wounds.

Remember that magic items are supposed to be an optional thing that the DM doles out if he so chooses, and those items make the party stronger than the baseline, period. I include healing magic items in that category.

So I prefer if the PCs have a limited window of damage they can take before dying, but have a limited way of restoring that window. In 4e, those where the hit point total and the healing surges (accessible through rests and second wind). Granted, in 4e a PC began with 5 to 7 surges, and rarely gained more. DDN doesn't have to have that many, right upfront, but some measure of restoring your own health needs to be there, to keep the narrative going.

 

[Libramarian]

So let's say we have a game in which (on average) 4-6 characters go adventuring and, over the course of the day, their resources are whittled down.

Sometimes (actually quite often) those resources are asymmetrically depleted for one character. This creates a strong incentive for the group as a whole to stop and replenish, decreasing their chances of failing any given challenge and--more importantly--keeping the player of said character engaged rather than on the sidelines.

How do you solve that problem for all groups in a way that doesn't make any one type of character obligatory?

Good point, but how about the parry maneuever? You can use that to cover your asymmetrically depleted allies.

I feel this rules out 1st level classic D&D play - would you agree?

Not as it pertains to whether or not a cleric is necessary (or 15mad issues) because if you only have a couple max HP then healing doesn't help much. It's a bit different in first level classic because monsters have like a 20-30% hit chance against good armor*, so you can mix it up a little as long as you keep your fighters in front. In subsequent levels monster "attack bonus" grows as PC HP grows, with AC remaining relatively static, gradually introducing HP resource management. I kind of like that, but it's true that there's a "sweet spot" in mid levels.

I do find that clerics are seen as necessary in AD&D but I think mostly because of how they dramatically change the party's resting healing rate (because on rest days they can load up all their slots with healing spells). I think this is an unexpected rules artifact so I houserule that healing spells can only heal you up to the number that you began the day with. I might go further and says healing spells have a cumulative -1 on each use on the same character until they hit max HP.

*I sometimes screw this up by making good armor too expensive for the starting wealth roll, which significantly increases lethality.

 

[I'm A Banana]

This is certainly a solution, but the problem is there are many gamers for whom the old "lose HP, get healed by the cleric or wait it out" is what they want. Part of my problem with how 4E was designed was that it tried to insert mechanical solutions to things that I considered to be issues of flavor and in-game realities. So while your solution certainly might work for a number of folks, to me it is going to feel like another mechanics-first effort to make the game play a particular way (whereas for me, I want to play around things like HP loss and needing magical heals).

I think it would mostly look like a matter of degrees.

So when your fighter DOES get injured (because he can't defend himself against every attack), he still can use a cleric to bump him back up. When your Wizard's spell does fail (because magic has limitations), she can still use a cleric to bump her back up. When your rogue's sneaking goes all wahooni-shaped (because failure is always an option), the cleric's going to be stepping in to save their bacon.

The notable bit is that most of these defenses are pro-active: they deal with not losing HP in the first place, rather than recovering what is already lost. In the "basic" game, a cleric may still be the only one able to put points back into you that have gone away, every character just has some capacity to stop them from going away in the first place (which, mathematically is ultimately the same thing).

The only real difference is that a cleric isn't required. If no one in the party wants to be a cleric, no one has to be, and the party just needs to be a little more pro-active about their defenses. Healing is icing on the cake (better than your Rogue's dodge because it can be used on allies; better than you're wizard's spell because it means you don't have to prepare first; better than your fighter's defenses because it works even when those defenses fail), not required for play.

Requiring healing, I think, is something we want to get away from, even in the Basic game, for all the reasons laid out by other insightful posters here (ie: not forcing a particular class or item to be necessary for play). And it's possible, because healing is only one way you can represent character defenses, and is arguably not even the most interesting way.