D&D 5E Bouncing heroes and healing tweaks

[wwanno]

Then I thought about a second option. What if every time someone gets dropped, they will take at least some minutes to be able to recover consciousness? If someone hits 0 HPs during combat, they can be stabilized, or even healed by cure wounds or whatever, but they do not simply come back to fight as if nothing had happened, after having their HPs restored to values bigger than zero.

I mean that expending inspiration you can bring that time before coming back to fight to zero.

So the players/PCs facing Tiamat (pr whatever other big bad guy able to kill you easily) can still have a chance (at a cost)


Inviato dal mio ASUS_Z00AD utilizzando Tapatalk

 

[Barolo]

If they're unwilling to take the time to heal an ally, what makes you think they will spend resources to case Revivify?

It seems to me that they would be more likely to have the other player roll up a new character.

Plus, unless you have two healers in the party who can Revivify, this is exceptionally punitive towards the healer.

Revivify is one exception to the resurrection spells that I just "charge" the expected from the book, as we perceive this as more of analogous to an expensive last resort cure than to an actual raising from the dead. Curiously, this one spell usually was kept on the paladin arsenal, and I think she felt really responsible to have this available for the sake of the others, if need would arise. It didn't really matter when her fighter team-mate was eaten whole by the gargantuan snake-fish. The monster could spare two attacks to auto-crit twice and kill him after he dropped to the "ground", so I described the death as him being swallowed by the beast.

You can only play the game in front of you. Lamenting over some theoretical, preferable game, does nothing for the game that's currently being played. Maybe they want to have a good reason to heal people earlier, but unless it actually makes sense for their character to do that, it would be bad role-playing to pretend otherwise.

I agree. The thing is, they do not try early healing even when it would be the superior option. Sometimes they just take the whole situation for granted and get "surprised" when it ends bad.

The idea that the paladin should save Hands to bring people back up, instead of using it to preemptively heal, isn't that crazy of an idea. There's a good chance that a lot of that healing would have been wasted later on; there's no point in healing someone for 10 or 15 instead of 1, when the enemy hits for 20. Spending everything to bring someone up to full would mean that you don't have enough left to bring people up from unconsciousness later. Healing is a game of guessing, and the world where everyone has 150% of their total HP in self-healing everyday presents a significant change to the value of magical healing. I can't exactly blame the character for following their chosen strategy.

Indeed it is not a crazy idea, but sometimes she would take it too far. She would play this card quite often. It was just not very fun for the other guy that was holding the frontline with her when he saw that when she was getting the pounding, she would go full-in healing herself for some 70 HPs after she lost half her total, while in other fights he was taking the pounding and she would patiently wait for him to drop and only then she would heal him back some crumbs, so that he would proceed to drop and raise again and again. I does feel like good teamwork is what is missing, but those people are good friends of mine, and we do have a good time playing, specially out-of-combat.

When I run the game, I try not to make it too much of a game of guessing, as I find it a more rewarding experience when players make their choices well informed. While I do not display on the open monster numbers, the descriptions I provide, and intel available before the encounters, usually reveal the monster overall strengths and weaknesses (so that players can try to make use of spells that target weak saves, for instance, or have a chance to know that some elemental attack will not work well), and the descriptions during the fight usually allow them to guess more-or-less the damage range of the attacks they face, or the remaining HPs of monsters.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

If they're unwilling to take the time to heal an ally, what makes you think they will spend resources to case Revivify?

Time and spotlight are a different type of resource from gold. It's already a stretch to assume such selfish players that they aren't willing to spend a Healing Word to stabilize, so if you want to extend that assumptions to perfectly selfish players who aren't willing to spend anything on anyone else, then you may well be right. I guess I was expecting them to become more reasonable once combat was over.

 

[CydKnight]

I had a player with a Cleric in my last game session as a DM decide to attack instead of heal a fallen comrade within 5 feet who already had one Death Save fail. The fallen character rolled a natural 1 on his next Death Save and was therefore DEAD. The party spent the next 2 hours of game time backing out of the dungeon and trekking it to a city large enough to find a Cleric of a level high enough to resurrect the fallen comrade before returning to the point of their previous progress.

 

[MoonSong]

You know that DM that likes their game to be one which hero death matters? Who feels like the game should seem deadly on the perspective of the adventures so to keep them on their toes? Who takes from their hat add-ons to resurrection and raise dead spells that effectively make them once-in-a-campaign events that require quests that could even take more lives than save, so to restrict any magical resurrection to people that are really, really, (really?) praised and cherished, so as to someone be willing to save their own life to try to save that other person? Who does not shy away from employing save-or-die (or better, choose-wisely-or-die) scenarios, as long as they are well telegraphed to the players so to avoid gotchas. Well, I am one of those damn DMs.

Something that has been happening for a while (it is not a 5e specific issue), and that bothers me is the recklessness displayed by some players regarding other adventurers in the party. I have players that simply refuse, at any cost, to spend one turn or a higher level resource to rescue a comrade in bad conditions during a melee. I find it more annoying that by entitling themselves to be complete arses, they even manage to complicate some encounters, by not preemptively acting to protect one another, followed by a dropped ally, who subsequently loses their action and is one less threat for the enemies.

This usually seems to happen for two (or three) reasons that I could observe:

1. Using an action now to prevent an ally from dropping is perceived as a weaker strategy as acting before the fact to prevent the drop and the ally's losing an action.
2. Healing a fallen ally is cheaper, as any leftover damage does not get accounted for.
3. When the fight is too close to the end, it seem better just to try for a finishing blow and them rescue any fallen comrades.

While I generally agree with the third bullet myself (even though I find it somewhat reckless in some circumstances), the first bullet really annoys me. It has over and again being detrimental to the party tactics, but selfishness usually takes over and they never learn the lesson, even when adventurers start dying as a result of a battle becoming tougher.

The second bullet is a result of the specific way health is abstracted in 5e (as in previous editions, and with the house-rules my table used, all lost HPs had to be accounted), and I find it even more annoying, as it effectively introduces the "bouncing heroes" effect.

To address these issues (mostly the first and second bullets), I could go full "evil" and just start using actions from the baddies to terminate fallen heroes as soon as these baddies notice the healing capabilities of the party. But, on the other hand, sometimes I feel like I am even more of an arse than my usual self by doing this. This "solution" has, though a subjective advantage of not needing any rules tweak.

Then I thought about a second option. What if every time someone gets dropped, they will take at least some minutes to be able to recover consciousness? If someone hits 0 HPs during combat, they can be stabilized, or even healed by cure wounds or whatever, but they do not simply come back to fight as if nothing had happened, after having their HPs restored to values bigger than zero.

I feel like this option would add some interesting twists to the game dynamics, the party should start to feel more pressed to hold everybody up, as if someone drops, that ally will be out of action until that combat ends. It also enables some nice action scenes, with someone stabilized being carried by their allies in a retreat. Also, allowing an ally that dropped to be defenseless in the middle of the brawl might look very dangerous, as that ally will not be easily recoverable. I know it could potentially let Jimmy very bored as his selfless chevalier PC got down in the beginning of the combat trying to protect that frail spellcaster ally, but I think most of the time the party would go to extra pains to avoid this from happening as it would be very detrimental for the whole group.

But, you know, I can be overlooking some obvious detrimental consequences, so I am looking forward for some input from the community. What do you think? Do anybody have another option that could address these points? Thanks for all contributions in advance!

Another idea, this one straight from my personal heartbreaker. Change the normal getting to 0 rules. When you get to 0, you can attempt a "death save" to stay in the fight, then again at the end of your turn and then again each time you receive damage. If you fail you are out of the fight but stable, unless you exceed three turns in which case you simply die. Regardless you can no longer be healed and at the end of combat you die anyway. If you don't want to, you just remain unconscious but stable. If you are stable, no healing will wake you up until you are fully healed or complete a short rest.

Another one, just have monsters heal to full each time they down an enemy.

 

[MarkB]

Change it so that regular healing spells won't bring a downed character back to consciousness. Then introduce a new healing spell which will - but it's an area burst centred on the caster, that affects all downed creatures within a wide radius. Also apply the same death-and-dying rules to monsters as to PCs.

Now, if the party choose to wait until someone drops to heal them, they'll also heal every monster they've dropped in the fight.

 

[Saeviomagy]

The case studies you gave make me think that you're looking at the wrong solution. Your players aren't doing this from a "sensible tactic" avenue. They're doing it because they're selfish idiots. Seriously - I've never ever seen someone bleed out because other players just ignored them and kept fighting.

I really don't think that their behaviour is going to change, almost no matter what you do with healing.

It sounds like you might already be doing after-battle breakdowns (or at least your players are). If not, I'd suggest you point some of these scenarios out to them.

You need a culture change.

This might be achievable simply by highlighting things in different ways. For instance calling out that any damage a healed from the brink character does is really damage done by the healer "Rondimus just did 30 points of damage with his cure light wounds!". My 4e rogue's warlord buddy used to declare that he was attacking with my rogue for 45 damage (or whatever) whenever he granted a basic attack.

You might also be able to achieve it by making them walk a mile in each other's shoes. Have a session where everyone plays someone else's character for some reason (curse, body swapping device, a dose of the flu making everyone feel 'off').

You might want to change who is playing a healer. Sounds like it should be no issue to permanently kill off characters. Just point out to people rerolling that their party effectively has no healing if the characters/players capable of healing historically don't do so.

Alternately you could just assume that your party will be suboptimal and not heal. Either you'll need to scale back encounters from their current level, or you'll just have to get comfortable with the party members dying.

If you want a rule change?

The problem is that your players are selfish idiots. They're not healing other characters because they're valuing their own damage numbers above anything the other character can contribute. So anything you do has to make healing a more fun thing for the healer to do, or remove the onus of healing from them. Making healing on downed characters less effective, or using the coup-de-grace options won't change that: they'll just continue to be selfish idiots, and the people not getting healed will suck up the downsides.

That's a hard thing to create without unbalancing the game. I guess you could create a healing spell that has a damage rider or other beneficial effect if the target isn't already down? Or temporary hitpoint spells that have higher efficiency than cure wounds does? I'm worried that your players are selfish enough that it won't matter unless the spells are ridiculously overpowered.

 

[Fanaelialae]

Another idea, this one straight from my personal heartbreaker. Change the normal getting to 0 rules. When you get to 0, you can attempt a "death save" to stay in the fight, then again at the end of your turn and then again each time you receive damage. If you fail you are out of the fight but stable, unless you exceed three turns in which case you simply die. Regardless you can no longer be healed and at the end of combat you die anyway. If you don't want to, you just remain unconscious but stable. If you are stable, no healing will wake you up until you are fully healed or complete a short rest.

Another one, just have monsters heal to full each time they down an enemy.

I've been working on a similar idea, using the Lingering Injury rules from the DMG. The idea is that it allows PCs to continue fighting when they would otherwise go unconscious, but at the risk of long term or even permanent injury (death is also a possibility, of course; even a hero can only push themselves so far before their body gives out). Keep in mind that these rules are both unfinished and untested.

When a PC would be reduced to zero hp, they may roll on the wound table (below) to remain standing at 1 hp.



Injuries (including wounds) are difficult to heal. The damage absorbed by the wound is the DC to heal it. Magical healing can reduce this DC. You can attempt to recover from one (non-permanent) injury after a long rest. This requires a successful Medicine check against the DC.

The idea is that you are most likely to accrue Wounds (10-19) as you are injured, each of which give you a cumulative -1 on future Wound checks, which in turn makes it more likely that you'll suffer a long-term or permanent injury (or death). I added the ability to shake off half your wounds on a natural 20 because I want the PCs to have a chance of coming out of the death spiral. I've also considered heroic last stand rules, where a character who is using these rules gains a significant offensive boost (because I like the idea of a character becoming even more badass as he's on the threshold of death). I might make it a feat, I'm not really certain.

 

[S'mon]

It's very easy in 5e just to use negative hp and have PCs die at negative max. In one game I use that plus PCs only make 1st death save after 1 minute, 2nd at 10 minutes, 3rd at 1 hour etc. The idea there is I want fallen PCs plausibly ignored by enemies and able to wake up later.

Your problem seems to be PCs dying a lot because they get ignored by your healers. Making fallen PCs less likely to die seems the best solution to me, though just letting lots of PCs die because your group are not very good at playing D&D would also be fine.

 

[Barolo]

The case studies you gave make me think that you're looking at the wrong solution. Your players aren't doing this from a "sensible tactic" avenue. They're doing it because they're selfish idiots. Seriously - I've never ever seen someone bleed out because other players just ignored them and kept fighting.

I really don't think that their behaviour is going to change, almost no matter what you do with healing.

It sounds like you might already be doing after-battle breakdowns (or at least your players are). If not, I'd suggest you point some of these scenarios out to them.

Yes, that is the good thing about having these kinds of conversations. I started writing pretty convinced I knew what the issue was, but after some exchanges in post, feedback from fellow forum-dwellers about consequences of the proposed changes and also suggestions on how I might do things differently, the real matter becomes more evident.

The players (at least the majority of them) are actually nice in regards to the others. They do seem to abhor "wasting" actions stabilizing or healing comrades, but usually don't think twice before throwing themselves on harm's way to protect their allies or any NPC they care about. They also seem to get too stingy regarding using resources in a significant manner to make healing effective, even when, by the end of the day, they still have a lot of resources remaining. They do not shy out of burning resources to do pornographic amounts of damage, though....

It does get annoying when they are deep into the sixth or seventh encounter in the day (pretty much getting to the end of the dungeon already) and by the last rounds of combat the "bouncing" starts. And then, when combat ends, I get some players complaining about just that, which I do understand, the narrative gets really weird when this happens, and the scene as a whole is ugly. But on the other hand, I point out they managed to finish the day with significant resources unspent but still they gave themselves the luxury of being careless about healing or otherwise preventing damage or using defensive tactics. And then, sometimes, some PC dies, and everybody is not happy about that.

You need a culture change.

This might be achievable simply by highlighting things in different ways. For instance calling out that any damage a healed from the brink character does is really damage done by the healer "Rondimus just did 30 points of damage with his cure light wounds!". My 4e rogue's warlord buddy used to declare that he was attacking with my rogue for 45 damage (or whatever) whenever he granted a basic attack.

You might also be able to achieve it by making them walk a mile in each other's shoes. Have a session where everyone plays someone else's character for some reason (curse, body swapping device, a dose of the flu making everyone feel 'off').

You might want to change who is playing a healer. Sounds like it should be no issue to permanently kill off characters. Just point out to people rerolling that their party effectively has no healing if the characters/players capable of healing historically don't do so.

Alternately you could just assume that your party will be suboptimal and not heal. Either you'll need to scale back encounters from their current level, or you'll just have to get comfortable with the party members dying.

I know I have been playing way longer and way more often than most of my players, and I am starting to realize that maybe I should just soften the game. But then again I get second thoughts about that, as I already feel my game is not really very challenging (even though they keep on dying stupidly) and to lower the bar could lead to a game without that tension that makes the combats interesting. Do you get what I mean?

On the other hand, I could just assume their tactics as they are, and throw in encounters accordingly. I am not sure how to achieve that, though. I mean, what exactly should I adjust in the encounters to take into account that the party in general refuses to back down to defend or heal, even though they have invested classes, levels, spell selection, etc., to have all the resources for that?

If you want a rule change?

The problem is that your players are selfish idiots. They're not healing other characters because they're valuing their own damage numbers above anything the other character can contribute. So anything you do has to make healing a more fun thing for the healer to do, or remove the onus of healing from them. Making healing on downed characters less effective, or using the coup-de-grace options won't change that: they'll just continue to be selfish idiots, and the people not getting healed will suck up the downsides.

That's a hard thing to create without unbalancing the game. I guess you could create a healing spell that has a damage rider or other beneficial effect if the target isn't already down? Or temporary hitpoint spells that have higher efficiency than cure wounds does? I'm worried that your players are selfish enough that it won't matter unless the spells are ridiculously overpowered.

I am not really looking at a rule change, just some way to solve those table issues. If changing some rule could help, good, but any other solution is as welcome. Sometimes they get too focused on killing enemies instead of understanding what is really going on in the fight. They take for granted that the best defense is a strong offense. When this is the case, the battles run really well, but when this is not the case, then bad things happen, and it is not because the game difficulty has changed, but because the challenge is different.

A little bit off-topic, but still somewhat related, this eagerness to go full offense also has other consequences. For instance, some of the players specialize in nova-alpha attacks. Sometimes it happens that they discharge such a huge amount of damage in round 1 that the enemies, without knowing what will come next, simply flee, or start using skirmish tactics, which the group hates to handle. It is funny for me because they really like to kill all opposition, to be sure not to need to handle it again later, but more often than not they fail to reach this objective just because of this tactic, and sometimes they even lose very important objectives because of that too, as the enemy doesn't even bother to keep on an already lost battle and escapes with some important item/info/MacGuffin. They point out that they understand the enemy is just reacting to their chosen approach, but nonetheless complain that this converts fights into desperate chases. Then I get puzzled that they know the cause of their problem but they can't help themselves just doing that again on the next opportunity.

It's very easy in 5e just to use negative hp and have PCs die at negative max. In one game I use that plus PCs only make 1st death save after 1 minute, 2nd at 10 minutes, 3rd at 1 hour etc. The idea there is I want fallen PCs plausibly ignored by enemies and able to wake up later.

Your problem seems to be PCs dying a lot because they get ignored by your healers. Making fallen PCs less likely to die seems the best solution to me, though just letting lots of PCs die because your group are not very good at playing D&D would also be fine.

This is one problem, yes. They should be dying when they do stupid things themselves, but as a team game, they more often die because somebody else neglected them, which is sad and does not always "taste well" after the game. The other problem is narrative. All this bouncing does not make for good fighting scenes.

Time and spotlight are a different type of resource from gold. It's already a stretch to assume such selfish players that they aren't willing to spend a Healing Word to stabilize, so if you want to extend that assumptions to perfectly selfish players who aren't willing to spend anything on anyone else, then you may well be right. I guess I was expecting them to become more reasonable once combat was over.

This is the tricky part. It is not always easy to acuse someone of being selfish, as they present different behavior depending on different scenarios, and quite often they act heroically and selflessly. To me, it seems more like they are reckless, they sometimes just take the mechanics of the game regarding healing and stabilization and the "offense is the best defense" motto for granted, and get blindsided by different reactions from the enemies, or by the occasional string of bad luck in situations where luck should not have taken a part to begin with.