Flat Healing Without Using a Surge--Infinite Daily HP?

[Makaze]

There's no reason to force the game so they can't do that...

No reason other than it bothers you... And it's not adversarial to design encounters to discourage those situations. It's adversarial to capriciously change them on the fly in response to a tactic you didn't expect your players to employ.

There are certainly some KotS encounters that barely dealt us any damage at all and didn't seem could possibly have killed us. Should they not have counted as 'credible threats'?

They had the potential to though and that's all a threat is, the potential to cause harm or use up some of the parties resources.

It's not an easy judgment call. You can make it, but you shouldn't have to in 4e.

It tends to be for me. *shrug* And that's what being a DM is all about. Making the best judgement call you can at the time so that hopefully everyone has fun. The rules can't (and shouldn't for that matter) do all of that for you, they just provide a framework for you to work within and apply your own judgement to.

 

[Rystil Arden]

Taking a look at it, it's a Cleric 27, so only available to characters well on their way to deityhood. And there's no reason they couldn't use it every 5 minutes.

It would heal somewhere in the 20-ish neighborhood, per person, every 5 minutes. If the battle was long and tough, they could probably manage to heal up fully in a half-hour to an hour.

I guess I don't see why this should bother me. Yes, it sidesteps healing surges, and it's infinite between-encounter healing. However, if the party can spend an hour waiting for the cleric to burst every five minutes, they can probably spend 6 hours on an extended rest just as easily. What's more, they don't get any healing surges back, which would prove very useful in combat.

Other than hitting a milestone easier if your DM is a pushover, what's the flaw here?

-O

There's also a limit on extended rests. If you've recently taken one, you might need to wait quite some time to do it again, and some games have time pressure on the PCs. The milestone thing is there too. And indeed, with good enough Charisma, you probably wouldn't need to spend a half hour to heal up to full unless people were really fighting down to the wire every encounter. Remember, it's healing so it adds Wis as well. That will probably come down to 23 or 24 HP per burst (possibly more with Demigod, which is a likely Cleric ED)--and maximum HP will be in the realm of 150, so 30 minutes is essentially healing from nothing to full. Essentially, you take away the effective and reasonably cool and fun device of throwing weaker encounters at the party and wearing them down first, at least unless you don't allow a short time to rest in between encounters, in which case they basically count as one encounter anyway, right?

And anyway, I thought that one of the key features is that the math scales to high levels, including the math with healing surges and total daily durability. Multi-Sunburst is a sidestep past that.

It's easy enough to fix it, so why not?

 

[Rystil Arden]

They had the potential to though and that's all a threat is, the potential to cause harm or use up some of the parties resources.

One lone enemy (particularly if you choose an elite) released to battle also has that potential. In both cases, it isn't likely, but the potential is there. If the party decided to keep Irontooth alive for bloodsport after defeating his buddies, I think it would be more of a credible threat than the first encounter, for instance.

It tends to be for me. *shrug* And that's what being a DM is all about. Making the best judgement call you can at the time so that hopefully everyone has fun. The rules can't (and shouldn't for that matter) do all of that for you, they just provide a framework for you to work within and apply your own judgement to.

It's Oberoni's Fallacy--defending a bad rule because you can just use Rule 0 to stop it (and the 'credible threat' rule is vague and qualitative enough to effectively be exercising Rule 0). This is even moreso the case with your (quite reasonable but admittedly Rule 0) decision on what you would do with Sunburst. The infinite healing is, in the framework of the 4e rules on healing, a poor design. The fact that you can curtail it with Rule 0 doesn't mean it should be there.

I agree, you can curtail it with Rule 0. I can curtail it with Rule 0. But you see why it's a fallacy to defend a rule that way, right? Otherwise, I could defend OD&D (or Palladium, or Synnabar, or whatever system you want to use as an example) vis-a-vis 4e by claiming we can just Rule 0 every rule of OD&D (or your other system of choice) to be the same way as it is in 4e, so the two systems are equal.

 

[Benly]

Personally, I saw the "credible threat" text as deliberately being something sufficiently reliant on DM judgment that it doesn't come into play until the DM chooses to say "Okay, I rule that tied-up orc/bag of rats/whatever a non-credible threat, you can't heal off it anymore, put the poor bastard out of its misery" and point to that page if rules lawyers start to kvetch about it.

 

[Fifth Element]

No, they shouldn't. They should balance the game for regular people, and let those who intentionally poke holes in the rules go hang themselves.

I used to think the way you do, but then I realized just how absolutely anal a ruleset has to be if it wants to 1) allow a wide diversity of mechanics and abilities, and 2) avoid exploits from those who intentionally set out to find and utilize glitches in the rules. There's a limit to how much ink should be spilled to stop people from behaving in that manner. After all, every drop of ink spilled in that mission is in essence inflicted upon the rest of us in the form of narrow, lawyerly, text heavy rules.

Cadfan is very wise.

I hope this whole thing is just a Pun-Pun-like thought experiment, not something that's supposed to actually be used. It's not a problem with the rules in any way.

 

[mattdm]

Aha, Sunburst is indeed a better example. It does the healing as an effect, so you don't need any enemy targets at all. Excellent find SoulStorm! I'll go edit the OP right away to stop all these people who have focused nitpickingly on the one power I used as an example and ignored the big picture.

Eh. I think this particular effect falls under "could use an errata, even if it isn't really game-breaking". Can you find another example? Because otherwise, it seems to me that this is the nitpicking exception rather than the other way around.

 

[Rystil Arden]

Cadfan is very wise.

I hope this whole thing is just a Pun-Pun-like thought experiment, not something that's supposed to actually be used. It's not a problem with the rules in any way.

Except Cadfan's rule doesn't make sense in this case--you would save ink by just not printing these powers.

Also, I think I should really start up a new thread that specifically references Sunburst first so people don't get off on a side-tangent about credible threat, since Sunburst doesn't work off a Hit.

"It's Epic so it doesn't matter if they break out of the healing surge system" is an acceptable way to deal with it, but it seems markedly inelegant in a system that is otherwise quite elegant and consistent from 1 to 30.

 

[Rystil Arden]

Eh. I think this particular effect falls under "could use an errata, even if it isn't really game-breaking". Can you find another example? Because otherwise, it seems to me that this is the nitpicking exception rather than the other way around.

I don't have the wherewithal to look through every power, though I welcome anyone to do so if they like.

However, I think you're absolutely right. These powers are an exception, and they should be errataed or eliminated. It's a failing to remain consistent with an elegant and successful portion of the 4e ruleset. It is not a failure of 4e, just these specific exceptions.

 

[Makaze]

One lone enemy (particularly if you choose an elite) released to battle also has that potential. In both cases, it isn't likely, but the potential is there. If the party decided to keep Irontooth alive for bloodsport after defeating his buddies, I think it would be more of a credible threat than the first encounter, for instance.

Well Irontooth is nasty. He might actually be a credible threat and the question in my mind would be is will the party be stronger or weaker after having faced him. If they'll be weaker then he's likely a threat, if they'll be stronger then clearly not. Course I'd only let them get away with it once...

It's Oberoni's Fallacy--defending a bad rule because you can just use Rule 0 to stop it

I don't see making a judgement call on credible threats as invoking Rule 0. To me Rule 0 is when you contradict the RAW or just completely pull something out of your ass. Ruling if something is a credible threat or not is just part of DMing. Much like deciding how many monsters to throw at the party, which ones, and what treasure they carry. All of those things have "rules" that are phrased more as guidelines that you're expected to adjust as your table requires.

Would my Sunburst ruling be Rule 0? I dunno but probably. It's not contained in the RAW but it's also not contradicted in the RAW. And I think the intent of the credible threat rule is to eliminate the very things we're discussing here, it just needed ot be a couple paragraphs longer.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Nail; your point is uncomfortably true about 4e because the definition of metagaming is when players have their characters react to the world around them as if it was just a game.

Ok, I'm with you here. That is true.

4E encourages metagaming because the way around this in most RPGs is to play your character so that he/she reacts to the EFFECT that the rule was designed to simulate. In 4E, these effects are VERY ambigious and so it is much harder to stop meta-gaming. However, I will never allow it in my games, for the simple reason that it completely destroys immersion and if you don't have immersion in a pen and paper RPG then you might as well play Oblivion, since it models combat and all the other action type malarky so much better than a pen and paper RPG ever can.

Here's where I'm confused. What is ambiguous about the effect of any power in the game? One power hurts an enemy and heals an ally. One power creates a wall that does damage to people who pass through it. One gives someone an extra attack. They all seem completely staight forward to me.

I know that when an enemy hits me with an attack that immobilizes me that it will run out in a couple of rounds, it doesn't last very long most of the time. That's not metagaming at all.

I don't think you need immersion in a game for it to be a role playing game. The goal of a role playing game is to play a character who exists in a fictional world and get to make decisions for him on what he does. You can do that with or without immersion. Besides, it depends what you mean by immersion. To me, if the world behaves how I expect it to, I have immersion. Even if it takes 30 minutes of discussing the rules to come up with what happens.

Some people believe that immersion means that the world is so close to being realistic that you could close your eyes and you might not even notice you are playing a game. That the goal of immersion is to close your eyes and pretend your not actually rolling dice and hopefully to get the rules to the point where you don't actually use them during the game. Since each time you need to reference rules, role dice to pick up a pencil you are breaking immersion.

I think that sort of immersion is bad, personally. It leads to extremely boring sessions of D&D all in the name of immersion. i.e. "This week our session is going to be about the party you guys have after you got back to town after slaying the dragon. Some NPCs will come up to you and congratulate you, you can role play with each other. You can pretend that you are drinking Ale. It will be a fun 4 hours because we'll be immersing ourselves in exactly what the characters would be doing." I'd rather go to a real part than play a D&D game pretending we were having one. I'd rather the DM summarize the party as "You have a good party and then wake up the next day hungover."

The simple way to stop meta-game thinking is to ask, would this character really react like this if he was really living in the game world? I agree it is difficult to completely eliminate it but if we don't try then we are just playing a war-game. Although D&D is about 3/4 of the way there now, it isn't there just yet.

True. And I haven't seen anything that breaks this in 4e. In fact, I saw a lot more of it in 3e. In 4e, players so far have said "Oh, so this power does damage and heals someone...cool, I'll use it when someone needs healing." In 3e, I've seen people attempt all sorts of convoluted cartwheels to convince the DM that powers that should never logically work together should work because that's what the rules say.