DMs - How do you treat Healing Word?

[Swarmkeeper]

If Healing Word were to take damage, I guess I would bust out my character's medicine kit to treat it. Or maybe just pass it a potion of healing.

Wait... what?

 

[Oofta]

I think there are a lot of podcasts out there that are just throwing out stupid **** to get clicks. This is just one more example.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Yeah, I've never seen Healing word to be a problem, though I've also rarely if ever seen the healer wait til a player is down to 0 before healing them.

Sure, most of us know the mathematical advantage, but our reasoning is more "if this healing lets you survive an extra attack we should be able to finish the fight this round" rather than "the fight is going so badly we need you to hit zero and be healed multiple times before we can even hope of finishing this"

And frankly, there are other ways of doing the same thing. Rogues with Healer's Kits or a Druid with Healing Spirit (Actually more powerful since it does not take a new slot and new bonus action every time) can also heal on a bonus action and pop someone back up.


Now, if it ever did become a problem, I think my preferred solution would be temporary exhaustion. Until the fight is over, you get a level of exhaustion for every time you've been dropped and brought back. This represents the strain on the body, but I'd have it go away at the end of the fight, because if I've got a player who was going down 3 or 4 times in the combat I don't want to punish them additionally beyond that and weaken their character for the next few sessions.

 

[vlysses]

Thank you everyone for the numerous and thoughtful responses! There is enough in there for me to find the right balance at our table...

 

[Tony Vargas]

This.

The purpose of in-combat healing is to prevent character death.

Healing Word means that monsters need to go to great lengths killing off fallen foes, which introduces needless cruelty to the game.

Not HW, specifically, but any readily available in-combat healing, particularly combined with the heal-from-0 rule.

Because you do heal from 0, even if you were overkilled by anything less than your max hps, it makes a disturbing amount of sense for the party healer to wait until you drop before healing you. Down to 1 hp and facing an enemy that's been averaging 30 hps a shot? As long as you max hps are significantly higher than 30, no problem, take that next hit, so the enemy 'wastes' 29 points of damage!

If you want the reverse perverse incentive, track & heal from negatives, and allow overhealing to roll over into temporary hps. Then it becomes in the healer's best interest to heal early to keep you from losing actions.

If you don't like the implications; that intelligent combatants always keep hitting on the defenceless fallen just keep them from getting healed back up,

Another option is to assume that such healing is comparatively rare, so enemies don't adopt that tactic until the whack-a-mole effect has been demonstrated, because they're just not used to coping with instant healing. In 4e, for instance, which introduced heal-from-0 /and/ minor action healing, all that healing was powered by surges, which monsters and NPCs got very few of (1 at heroic levels), and most had no way of triggering in combat, so, they'd, even rules-as-laws-of-physics-style, spend all their hypothetical backstory lives fighting other creatures that stay down when you drop 'em, and take a good few days to fully recover from being dropped, then face a party of PCs - who disconcertingly pop back up over and over - and, generally, die before they can adapt their usual drop-and-forget tactics to that unexpected behavior...

In 5e, it's just a matter of making casters with healing magic on their lists - Bards, Clerics, Druids, Ranger, & Paladins, at a minimum - comparatively rare, rare enough that their encounter with the PC party will likely be any give foe's first - and likely fatal - experience with one.

I suggest tracking negative hp down to -10. (A hero with 2 hp taking 8 damage is at -6, and falls unconscious. If he receives four points of healing, he's stabilized but still unconscious.)

That still leaves a strong incentive to take one last attack on a downed foe, since it's pretty likely to kill him outright. Tracking to negative max hps, OTOH, makes being certain of a downed foe tedious - and healing back from deep negatives an unattractive waste of healing resource, so you'll get the desired result: badly downed characters will stay most likely stay down.

Almost no predator (i.e. the gnolls) will deign to eat while being threatened. It just doesn't happen with sentient creatures.

Ghouls, OTOH, totally.

Very few creatures, intelligent or otherwise, will waste a round attacking a downed foe UNLESS that foe is particularly more dangerous than the others and has shown a propensity for standing back up.

Agreed.

I think there's an implicit assumption that PC abilities are commonplace in the setting, so most intelligent foes will routinely use tactics to counter them.

 

[Caliban]

I've seen people complain about how hard it is to kill characters in 5e. I kind of disagree (but not completely).

It's actually pretty easy to kill characters in or out of combat. It's just even easier to save them if other characters are willing to make the effort.

Between the Healer Feat, Healing Word, Lay on Hands, Healing Potions, and the various healing spells from Clerics, Druids, Bards, Rangers, Paladins, etc, healing can come from any other character in the group, or even from their familiar. (My warlocks often have their imps carry a few healing potions).

This bothers some people, others really don't see a problem.

 

[CapnZapp]

Not HW, specifically, but any readily available in-combat healing, particularly combined with the heal-from-0 rule.

Because you do heal from 0, even if you were overkilled by anything less than your max hps, it makes a disturbing amount of sense for the party healer to wait until you drop before healing you. Down to 1 hp and facing an enemy that's been averaging 30 hps a shot? As long as you max hps are significantly higher than 30, no problem, take that next hit, so the enemy 'wastes' 29 points of damage!

If you want the reverse perverse incentive, track & heal from negatives, and allow overhealing to roll over into temporary hps. Then it becomes in the healer's best interest to heal early to keep you from losing actions.

Thank you for reiterating my arguments

Except the temp hp part. That's not necessary and indeed I recommend against it. The game is easy as it is - there is no reason to allow Clerics to "pre-heal" the heroes before combat.

Simply track hp down to -10.

Suddenly a level 1 healing word isn't so obvious any longer. You can still heal a hero back up to guaranteed positive hp, but you will need to spend a second level slot at minimum.

Also, most mook monsters don't waste much damage. If you start in the single digits, a monster that makes 15 damage or less on average will not likely waste any damage when you track hp down to -10.

No longer does it make "a disturbing amount of sense" for the party healer to wait until you drop before healing you. Which is mission accomplished Not bad for such a simple change!

 

[Tony Vargas]

Thank you for reiterating my arguments

You're welcome.

Except the temp hp part. That's not necessary and indeed I recommend against it. The game is easy as it is - there is no reason to allow Clerics to "pre-heal"

There's already Aid and Inspiring Leader, for that matter.
What rolling excess healing to temps does do is remove an 'efficiency' dis-incentive against healing early or using a more powerful slot to do so.

Simply track hp down to -10.

Oh, you meant stop counting, not die at -10...

 

[Psikerlord#]

I think attacking dying characters is bad form when there are acive threats.

If there is a good reason why that PC has to die above all others then maybe NPCs would keep an eye on the unconscious. Otherwise, it sounds a bit like DMs picking on players.

If several characters are being brought back by healing word in fight after fight I have to question if your encounter difficulty is a problem. After all it’s a limited use spell which could be used for other things.

I like using real table examples. Two sessions ago the party had an intentionally difficult owlbear encounter that they had been sent to by an enemy who was trying to get them killed. The party rogue who was scouting ahead was roughed up round one with an unlucky crit for the beasts claw and a hit with the beak. Taken to zero.

The other party members engaged the beast and the following round the Druid cast healing word and the rogue played dead until his go at which point he critt’d the beast in return and killed it. Sure I could have had the owlbear savage his fallen prey killing him off. Is the game better or worse for doing that though? As it turned out, poetic irony, good teamwork and some common sense made it a great encounter and they survived the trap.

I agree. GMs resorting to attacking downed players, in order to give 5e a modicum of risk of PC death, is a symptom of 5e's flawed death and dying rules, combined with the ranged bonus action healing word, that gives us... whack-a-mole. The "counter" is the GM attacking downed foes, which in many cases wont make any sense whatsoever imo and ime.

Better to fix the problem at the source. I like (i) at zero hp roll a check for an injury/setback, and (ii) once at zero hp, all healing (magical or otherwise) takes 1d3 minutes to work. Suddenly dropping to zero becomes very serious again, like it was in older editions (when GMs didnt need to attach downed PCs; the death and dying rules were good and intrinsically dangerous).

 

[Psikerlord#]

I found it funny how fast that video was followed by threads here and in fb groups etc parroting the issue.

The issue has been around since the beginning of 5e. It's not really new. http://dndhackersguild.weebly.com/blog/how-to-fix-whack-a-mole-in-5e