Can you get too much healing?

[CapnZapp]

Mustrum_Ridcully: How do you (or your DM) make fights exciting, if you find that monsters do not threaten the lives of the PCs?

Dan'L: Not to worry. Taking two short rests in succession is to people like me who feel a short rest is a literary convention, not a specific time duration, not a problem because it isn't allowed.

Because being down your daily powers, but in all other ways equally viable going into ecounter 6 as you were going into encounter 1? Not really a hard choice at all, if there is even one scrap of plot reason to press on.

Well, evidently you feel
1) daily powers have an underwhelming effect on the decision to press on or to rest
2) healing surges have a nicely balanced effect on the decision to press on or to rest

My experiences are different:
1) daily powers have a nicely balanced effect on the decision to press on or to rest
2) healing surges have an overwhelming effect on the decision to press on or to rest

That is, to me running out of surges is what every encounter should be about, and not just the last one of the day! However, asking the players to press on even when they're unhealable is a unreasonable demand in my book.

Thanks for your reply though! As for specific numbers on the per-encounter issue, I think I need to a) think about that some more but regardless b) discuss it in a separate (and future) thread...

 

[CapnZapp]

Yes, I've been saying this since day 1 really. Putting your characters in a situation where they have to go on, but they can't possibly win is, quite literally, a text book example of bad game design. This is why you see in every video game the player either regenerates, can return to town, gains health when they die and respawn or can gain health in fights or some other mechanic that doesn't leave them in a situation where they're high and dry.

Healing surges are a very poorly made mechanic that promotes this situation. DMs of course can get around it, but it requires hoops or immersion breaking or inconsistency, none of which are desirable.

Fixing surges are your best bet. Unlimited works. If you don't like unlimited then stop healing potions from using/requiring a surge, they already require both gold and actions to use, they don't need to be "balanced" 3-ways. It's also generally pretty easy as a DM to add potions to loot if your players need healing without it breaking immersion or seeming out of place.

Thanks for seeing it my way!

I'll give the healing potion idea some thought.

Because this effectively means character can heal up to max hp for free between encounters (10 gp a pop quickly becomes nothing), my initial idea was to simply say "a short rest restores all hp".

But forum responses have made me realize I'm losing out on a big part of the resource management game if I do that.

And really, I'm really only out to get rid of the so-called "choice" you get when running out of surges, replacing it with a real choice. That is, make running out of surges less painful.

I realized free healing wasn't central to that goal, and so I removed it.

Healing potions still have their place in the game, as a fall-back option for those times you can afford the extra time and expense required.

 

[KarinsDad]

That is, to me running out of surges is what every encounter should be about, and not just the last one of the day! However, asking the players to press on even when they're unhealable is a unreasonable demand in my book.

I find this totally unreasonable.

The point of a good encounter is to have fun, not to run out of surges. What a strange comment. Running out of surges in an encounter may or may not be fun, but to run out of surges every encounter is totally not fun and leads to single encounter days.

 

[CapnZapp]

@KarinsDad:

Not sure I see how your replies are directly targeted towards my quote...?

First off, let me make it absolutely sure that, yes, it's me and not the game that is causing the difficult encounters, in that I don't accept easy fights you need to have for mechanical reasons (rather than for story or drama reasons).

You talk about an "endgame". Not sure this means you accept there is to be an endgame stipulated by the mechanics, but if so, that means you accept "the time before the endgame".

I don't. To me, "the time before the endgame" means "the time where your players aren't in danger and where fights can't generate excitement".

Why have a game where the players could put their PCs on autopilot and go watch television for the first two fights, only returning later when low resources are making the game actually interesting? (And returning to choose to rest for the day, but that's a different issue)

You say "The concept of making every encounter tough in order to challenge players and avoid the easy grind is a flawed concept."

Not sure what to make of this.

Are you saying "the easy grind" is inevitable? Or even desirable? But... I'm guessing I'm only misinterpreting you, so please feel free to expand on this further.

My point is that "easy fights" should be something selected by the story, the drama, the GM.

And not something the players have control over. Allowing the PCs to select themselves whether a fight should be an easy one (because they expend resources) or a hard one (because they don't) is the real flawed concept, if you ask me.

Because this leads to players choosing only easy encounters, and then resting for the day, when they no longer can make encounters easy.

Arguing the DM should force the party to continuing on just to get to the juicy hard encounters where things get interesting only makes me shake my head in bewilderment: why then not make the game allow encounters to be hard in the first place, even if this restricts player freedom in how they spend their resources?

Back to you, KarinsDad. You say "both are grinds" but I'm afraid I've lost you there.

Hopefully we can agree grinds are to be avoided. A game that enforces grinds is a bad game that we do not want to play, right?

But I fail to see how having few exciting fights can be labeled a grind. In fact, I would have thought this to be the opposite of the grind!

My problem, if you remember, isn't that I can choose to have fewer more difficult fights. It is how the game allows the players to bunk up so many healing surge triggers even these encounters become non-threatening!

And finally, your world appears to be set in stone

I can see how you drew that conclusion, but let me assure you this is not the case.

Why then are my players resting when they run out of resources?

Because of two things:

1) pressing on at zero or low surges is felt to be foolish - almost suicidal. Our impression of the game is that it completely fails in making running out of surges a nice tension-builder for making this decision. The difference in power and satying power between a character with and without surges is simply too great for my players to find it exciting or heroic to press on without them - it's considered simply stupid.

I'm sure you can see how a group of players can arrive at a group conclusion where they all agree "when we run out of surges, that's it. Even if it means failing the mission".

2) by allowing a party to take Healing Words as daily powers. When you run out of your normal dailies you feel weary, but you don't feel completely out. Pressing on is a real prospect, and it makes for an interesting decision. (But as my replies to other posters show, this isn't the same for everybody).

Daily heals changes all that. Now you have dailies you can't live without.

 

[CapnZapp]

I really think the big problem has been missed by a lot of posters here. The game is not, at it's core, stable; it's only meta-stable. If everyone's working together (DM and players) to keep things balanced and fun, it hums along pretty well. But if people don't keep that goal in mind, there's a lot of corner cases that can spiral out of control, and ruin the game.

In this case, one too many PCs took a leader feat, so there was too much healing in the game, so the DM had to ramp up the threat to make things fun again, which meant that more players took leader feats. End result, everyone can heal pretty much at will, but no-one's got big offensive powers any more, so the fights get long and grindy making them even more boring.

The easy solution? Just talk to your players! Explain that the games gotten grindy because of their feat selection, and how if some of them drop the leader MCs for, say, a striker MC instead, the game would start to stabilize again in the sweet spot, where it's more fun and exciting for everyone. I had a similar situation in my game; we've got two leaders already (cleric and bard), and the fighter player was considering MC cleric (so he could take Warpriest); I suggested he look at MC barbarian instead, and he seems quite happy with that.

Thanks. You are certainly right!

If I can't come up with an universal solution (such as beginning th day with fewer surges) I will certainly ask my players to retrain out of those MC feats.

It's been my personal experience that players either choose not to do this, because or pride or convenience (my guys tend to extended rest between sessions rather than during them), or due to plot constraints.

For example, almost all LFR modules are one day adventures - there's _some_ reason not to sleep. In a non-LFR game, we've had two adventures - in one we assaulted a goblin lair and smashed through the initial fights but were running a bit lower on resources before the final fight... if we'd taken an extended rest, why would our characters assume it would be the same fight it was? I mean, either the goblins should flee if they're scared or track us down if they're not, or take some other action. The next adventure there was a ritual to stop and we'd already seen one town basically destroyed by it.

Yeah. Sure. Only not all adventures can't be like that.

And besides, my players would have felt that by the time of that final goblin fight, they would feel forced to rest. Any reinforcements be damned!

(And as an aside:

If these reinforcement makes for an exciting hard first encounter of the day, haven't I really only rewarded the players for resting...?

And if they are so massive the party TPKs, how would the party know that? And that the reinforcements weren't simply minor and that they would have TPK'ed anyway if they'd pressed on yesterday?

You see I'm running a sandbox game, where players can't simply assume they're meant to win against everything they encounter as long as they keep at it and don't rest.

No, in that case I would far prefer to simply talk to the players, saying "if you rest, chances are I am beefing up the encounter more than your rest is worth, so don't do it".

But in that case, I'd far prefer to simply disallow extended rests altogether. Perhaps saying "you can't take an extended rest right now, the story doesn't allow it".)

Fair - let us know how that works out!

I'll be sure to do that!

(Look out for a new thread in the houserules forum though...)







Right, hope that was everything (for now) and that I haven't missed anybody. Bye for now!

 

[MrBeens]

CapnZapp

One of the things you mentioned earlier that I don't think has been adressed yet is the fact that you mentioned that you don't have time in each session to run 3 or more fights, so you feel that you need to get to the climax "hard fight" quicker.
Why do you feel that each gaming session has to equate to an in game day - why not have session one the build up, then end the session right before the climax, then run the climax the next session?

 

[Ulthwithian]

First, I must echo MrBeen's question. That is an underlying assumption that must be examined.

Also, I would like to make a few points that may or may not have been explicitly made here (I have read every message).

First, you have stated, multiple times, that 4E gives the player the choice of when to rest. Can you give me a source for that? Because I emphatically deny this, or at least the assumed equivalent that '4E gives the player the sole choice of when to rest'. Last I checked, the Gamemaster is the one primarily tasked with the flow of the game. I firmly believe that all choices (defined as an act of will that decides between alternatives) have consequences.

The envelope should be pushed. You should force the players to fight without healing surges. If they complain, tell them that they shouldn't be profligate with their healing surges. If they return that the game is too difficult otherwise, you need to reduce the difficulty of the game if their return argument is valid.

Second, I would be willing to wager any amount of money that your situation produced itself. That is, the situation has a clearly logical, clearly delineated causal chain.

1) You refuse to use 4E's assumed encounter model. This right there accounts for every problem you've encountered. You see no use in 'easy' fights, and thus send, on average, encounters that would be considered too tough under 4E's model.

2) As a consequence of this, your players have made intelligent choices in that they are prioritizing their access to healing. This is due to 1), and we have no evidence that anyone but you sees 1) as required.

3) As a consequence of 2), you make the encounters harder, and you generate a positive feedback loop that threatens to spiral out of your control.

My suggestion? Play exactly as you should in 4E. Make the encounters exactly as 4E suggests you do. N-1, N, N+1, N+3. You seem to misunderstand that you can challenge your parties perfectly fine with at-level encounters. This creates a win-win situation for you. If the players need the healing (for whatever reason), there's no problem, and you keep going. However, if you don't, point out to them that those multiclass feats they took are more or less wasted.

Finally, I have to admit to some distaste to someone who opens by saying that they don't use 4E's models as a basis for their game, and then claim something is wrong with those models. Well, obviously you're not going to get an appropriate response out of 4E if you don't at least try to ascribe to its models. No game does.

 

[Nail]

That is, to me running out of surges is what every encounter should be about, and not just the last one of the day!

I find this totally unreasonable.

I, too, find CapnZapp's comment......"strange". I won't go as far as "unreasonable", as D&D is a game, so however you play the game is up to you. "Reason" has nothing to do with it.

But should every encounter be about running out of healing? (Really???) I'm a bit flabergasted. Huh! --> I did not know there were DMs out there that felt this way. That's new information to me.

 

[keterys]

Well, I think he means in the 'if people only had a couple surges' kinda way, so that it was something you had to care about every encounter rather than for the day.

 

[KidSnide]

I continue to think that the problem CapnZapp is experiencing is because he has shifted the balance between daily and encounter powers by making all of his combats hard. Since they are all hard, there are simply fewer encounters per day in his world than in the default D&D campaign.

Because of that (and that he loves hard fights), his players have responding to this by loading up on very efficient daily healing abilities and magic items that permit extra surges to be spent. This is perfectly logical on their part, but has the effect that it allows their defenders to run through surprisingly large numbers of efficient surges in a single fight. In my experience, players don't have tension because they run out of surges. I find that players get tense because they run out of encounter triggers and have to either spend relatively rare daily triggers or resort to less efficient potions and second winds.

If these powers are unusually good in your campaign and, as a consequence, everyone is taking them, then just make them less powerful. For example, you could say that daily heals from multi-class abilities don't give the +nd6 bonus healing. Or, (IMO preferably) you could talk to your PCs and convince them that the total number of multi-class heals and daily items needs to be cut down for the good of the game. Reasonable PCs will prefer to multi-class into something else to avoid having a GM cut down all their power.

This won't make healing surges a meaningful limitation (since apparently, your PCs can rest whenever they want and - surrounded by what I presume is a killer dungeon - I can hardly blame them for doing so at every opportunity), but it will restore the intended in-encounter dynamic of running out of good triggers.

- - -

Of course, I also think that you should encourage days that are longer than just a fight or two. I've met plenty of GMs who thought that the only fights worth fighting were ones where the PCs might lose, but I've never met a player who said that. IME, players like lots of things about D&D and one of the big ones is getting to feel cool. Sure, you also want some challenge, but that can come from reaching the goal on time (e.g. handling or bypassing all the encounters in a single day), role-playing or problem-solving through the difficult scene surrounded by some diverting action or just playing skillfully and efficiently.

And, for those in a dungeon setting, it is still pretty easy to set out meaningful day goals. Just give your PCs enough information about the dungeon so that they understand that there are zones of allied creatures and that -- if they stop to extended rest mid-zone -- they face a high risk that the creatures they have been attacking with either try to hunt them down or gather for defensive strength in their most defensible location. Provided you also let the PCs figure out where the zones start and end, the GM can control the pacing of the dungeon.

-KS