Healing in Combat

[Raith5]

I prefer healing in combat, I like the time sensitive and strategic role of the healer. I also think second wind is important.


While I like the 4th Ed approach to healing, there is just way to much of it. I am in a 4 th Ed party with one multiclass and one hybrid cleric and we are swimming in healing. There just seems to be a fundamental mis calculation somewhere.

I have no problem with cleric attacks that also heal, I can buy the narrative, but it does lead to overlapping sources of healing ( in 4 th Ed terms attacks, utility and healing words) which can lead to large amounts of in combat healing.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Heh, Im getting a "ready to heal yourself" ad in the banner on this topic.

 

[Herremann the Wise]

I think part of the problem is the increasingly casual attitude players have (3.x and 4e particularly) to having their characters go into negatives. There is no fear of becoming unconscious; 4e practically assumes it as part of its massive safety net. My point is, if players were encouraged to be more conservative with their character's hit points (by creating a genuine fear of going into negatives rather than practically embracing it), there would be less hit points needed to be healed, and thus those times where hit points are restored become more crucial and thus dramatic. This promotes less need for in-combat healing.

Interesting. I think, if anything, players would become even more dependent on healing if going into negatives meant something other than 'I'll be back at the end of the fight'.

What you are trying to do though is limit the need for in-combat healing and push it to out-of-combat healing in the form of rituals as quite a few seem to prefer. I think you need to ratchet down the challenge of an encounter though to reflect this core change in attitude regarding combat and diving into the negatives. This is due to the challenge being staying out of the negatives rather than just avoid death.

The moment you have less than the HP you need to survive one/two hits, you'd want to be healed.

Or perhaps it would encourage solving problems without using the combat first approach. I think the short rest mechanic as it stands is OK to keep a group up. What I'm suggesting though is a real attitude change from the 3e/4e series of combats mindset to a more careful use of resources, and avoiding combat unless it is truly necessary. A real case of picking your battles. XP for treasure encourages this attitude. Getting a standard amount of XP for a "section" of an adventure regardless of how many creatures you kill also encourages a goal-focused approach rather than a combat-focused approach. This obviously isn't to everyone's taste but just some ideas to throw into the mix.

Alternatively, a death spiral rather than an absolute threshold would still leave players wanting to be at 100%.

I don't think you need to create a death spiral. Just the attitude that if you go down, you're probably not getting back up unless the rest of the group can survive the encounter and give you some out-of-combat healing. Staying up becomes the challenge of a combat as much as defeating the opponents.

Best Regards
Herremann the Wise

 

[Chris_Nightwing]

There have been some interesting ideas put forward. I've latched on to one question though - how deadly should any individual encounter be?

Should it be that each encounter could potentially kill someone? Can you provide enough tension and/or fun if an encounter simply wears you down rather than maybe seriously injures you? My simulationist hat (which is most frequently on my head) says that, really, monsters should do a decent amount of damage and there should be enough of them that they aren't sitting ducks. This brings up armour as DR - a concept I have no difficulty with. You would still be getting hit and taking damage, but it wouldn't be very much. Again though, I would want it to swing both ways.

I remember in 3E there was a statement along the lines of 'an encounter of the correct CR for the party should consume 20% of their resources'. Is this the right balance, or should we turn it down to 10%? My statistician hat says that depends on the shape and width of the distribution - and prefers a lower average with a wider base, so a given encounter might use 1% of your resources, or up to 20%, but most of the time 10%.

I am now definitely set on having no clerical healing that is entirely in addition to your normal hit dice healing. This means that extra healing should be available through a background, a theme, by some generic means, and that specific clerical healing should enhance normal healing rather than replace it. As I said in my original post - whatever means of healing exist should be available to all characters; the right kind of clerics get this power as a magical option, for free.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

3E suggested that you might not have to prepare these spells - just use them when you had to instead of spells that set things on fire. This sounded like an elegant solution, but ultimately it made things slightly worse, because now you couldn't excuse yourself having at least one spell that set things on fire if the party took a serious beating - you had to heal them all.

I think any discussion of healing in 3E should not forget the prevalance and cheapness of Wands of Cure Light Wounds. It required a combination of easy magic item access and wealth by level guidelines to "work", but it was pretty important for many groups, at least those found on EN World discussions at the time.

4E said, ok, fine, healing people is something you do that doesn't consume your other resources, or even your main action! This also sounded elegant, especially as the second wind mechanic gave people a reason to play without a cleric. However, what this did instead was just give everyone a great big hitpoint buffer. Your HP in combat were really your HP + some quantity depending on how many leaders you had. Healing was more of an automatic, twice a fight I gotta make sure the fighter is still standing, kind of thing (and indeed, became bizarrely encouraged once leader abilities added riders to being healed).

While it's true that a good Healer was ... well, good. It did always cut into your daily resources - not "capital" Dailies, but dailies, name healing surges.

That's precisely what Cure Light Wound Wands did not do - they were so cheap at high levels that they didn't cost any meaningful resource for your party

The idea was if you take a Striker instead of a Leader, you kill enemies faster so you would need less healing (but possibly more daily powers). At least that was the assumption, I am not sure how well it worked in play, since in our groups we usually have some leader around. Since Clerics are not mandatory anymore for healing, in a way having a healer was more guaranteed then ever though.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

There have been some interesting ideas put forward. I've latched on to one question though - how deadly should any individual encounter be?

I guess the question here is - how many will there be in a typical gaming session, and how long do they take?

If a combat is a 5 minute affair, then it probably shouldn't be very deadly. If a combat is 1 hour, it probably should, otherwise there is no real tension.

If you want to do 20 combats in a session, the combats can't all be life-or-death situations really, and both the number and the expected deadliness point to short combats. Combat becomes something that may be abit more elaborate then disabling a trap.

If you want only one combat per session it can be deadly or easy, but it probably depends on its significance and length whether it's supposd to be deadly, but again, the longer that combat is too last, the more tension it must offer, and that probably requires deadliness.

3E with its CLW Wands caused a situation where you really wanted combat to be deadly each time. BUt the rest of the system wasn't prepared for that. Your spell swould run out so fast (and spellcasters would both be needed and dominate for that to work.)

4E ran with that concept and ensured that hit points would go up and down a lot and significantly so - you would go bloodied and close to 0 if not below quite often, even if a healer was present. Every class had healing surges and daily powers to deal with that, so no class could really dominate, and everyone was challenged to bring his best.
I enjoyed that, but 4E did kinda remove the "easy" and "short" combats. There was a reasonable chance no resources at all would be spent in such a combat, and the combat would still last too long thanks to the variety of options and the hit points the NPCs would have (and if you'd use minions, the combat could be over after the first area attack, several of which only being at-wills or encounte rpowers).

I thin kfor long combats to be tenseful and engaging, they need a threat of death. In a game with ablative hit points like D&D, that requires a lot of yo-yoing the health - which in turn means mid-combat healing. Otherwise you plink away hit points for so long and pressure is only felt at the very end, if at all (or desperation sets in as the statistics of the situation already tell you're gonna fail, at least if you can't escape the entire fight.).

 

[Chris_Nightwing]

I think any discussion of healing in 3E should not forget the prevalance and cheapness of Wands of Cure Light Wounds. It required a combination of easy magic item access and wealth by level guidelines to "work", but it was pretty important for many groups, at least those found on EN World discussions at the time.

Let's please avoid that again! The ease of potion creation in the playtest has me a little wary already.

While it's true that a good Healer was ... well, good. It did always cut into your daily resources - not "capital" Dailies, but dailies, name healing surges.

That's precisely what Cure Light Wound Wands did not do - they were so cheap at high levels that they didn't cost any meaningful resource for your party

The idea was if you take a Striker instead of a Leader, you kill enemies faster so you would need less healing (but possibly more daily powers). At least that was the assumption, I am not sure how well it worked in play, since in our groups we usually have some leader around. Since Clerics are not mandatory anymore for healing, in a way having a healer was more guaranteed then ever though.

Let's consider some numbers? I'd like to work it out. If a hit from an enemy deals 12.5% of your HP, then a heal will allow you to take two more hits, and assuming we're in a long grinding combat, deal damage twice more. As a leader you also get to deal damage yourself after that heal. If you take a striker instead, you need to deal enough extra damage that you prevent those two extra hits occuring in the first place. So, either the combat lasts N rounds, and HP/N damage is dealt each round, or combat lasts N+2 rounds and HP/(N+2) damage is dealt each round. In my theoretical party of 2, the defender and leader will deal the same damage, so they each deal HP/2(N+2) per round. In the other party of defender and striker, to get HP/N damage each round the striker will deal HP(N+4)/2N(N+2) damage, which is (N+4)/N times more than the defender. In a 6 round combat, that's 160% of the defender's damage, in a 4 round combat that's twice defender damage.

I don't know offhand what the real margins are, and obviously there are other considerations, but for each round a character stays standing because they were healed, the striker needs to deal that additional damage output in the rounds that went by before they were healed. I feel terrible for thinking about a combat this way

 

[delericho]

There have been some interesting ideas put forward. I've latched on to one question though - how deadly should any individual encounter be?

As always, there should be a mix. The 3e DMG has it about right, where most encounters are at EL = Av Party Level, but you get a significant number of weaker encounters, a smaller number of tougher-but-doable encounters, and a small minority of overwhelming encounters.

Where 3e and 4e go wrong (and, all too often, older editions also) is that there is relatively little that the PCs can do to tilt the odds. Basically, if the party just go charging in, the encounters should be tougher (either because the enemy has an entrenched position, or because the orc tribe respond by concentrating their forces). That tends not to happen in published adventures, where encounters tend to be static set-pieces.

Should it be that each encounter could potentially kill someone?

Absolutely every time combat is joined there should be the potential to kill a PC. That said, in most cases the odds should favour the PCs - after all, even if they have a 95% chance of success, they'll still most likely lose eventually!

(Personally, I would peg the average success rate at about 70% without PC loss, assuming average tactics. If the PCs just blindly charge in, that should drop dramatically, to 50%, 40% or even lower; conversely, if they make use of smart tactics, they should be able to increase their success rate to 85% or beyond.)

It's worth noting that I definitely favour "combat as war" over "combat as sport".

 

[Li Shenron]

I think there should be a reason to have a Cleric in the party, and to continue tradition I think that reason should be to have significantly better than normal healing capabilities. As long as this is true, I'm fine.

I also think there should be a reason to have a Rogue: to have significantly better than normal exploration, trapfinding, stealth and infiltration capabilities.

And a reason to have a Fighter: to have significantly better than normal fighting capabilities.

And a reason to have a Wizard: to have aces up the party's sleeve to beat challenges that are too difficult or even impossible with mundane means.

A party should know what is giving up if they don't include one of these classes, but the game should still be playable, although it might require some adjustment from the DM in the adventure selection (reflecting the fact that a party without a fighter shouldn't be looking for tough fights, and a party without a wizard shouldn't take on a quest against magical dangers).

(Personally, I would peg the average success rate at about 70% without PC loss, assuming average tactics. If the PCs just blindly charge in, that should drop dramatically, to 50%, 40% or even lower; conversely, if they make use of smart tactics, they should be able to increase their success rate to 85% or beyond.)

These % are really low... if they had 90% chance of winning each combat with no losses, this leads to something like 30% chance of at least one dead PC during a day with 4 encounters, and that's a lot unless you allow easy resurrection (or did you perhaps mean drop below zero rather than actual death?).

 

[delericho]

I think there should be a reason to have a Cleric in the party, and to continue tradition I think that reason should be to have significantly better than normal healing capabilities. As long as this is true, I'm fine.

The reason to have a Cleric in the party should always be "somebody wants to play the Cleric". Of course, a likely reason for wanting to play a Cleric is that they're better at healing, and that's fine. But there should be no implicit or inferred requirement that the party has a Cleric.

These % are really low... if they had 90% chance of winning each combat with no losses, this leads to something like 30% chance of at least one dead PC during a day with 4 encounters, and that's a lot unless you allow easy resurrection (or did you perhaps mean drop below zero rather than actual death?).

Yeah, I screwed up on the numbers.

The 70% without loss percentage should probably be for the party who do just charge in without thinking, while using good tactics can get it close to 100% (but not quite to 100%). Assuming reasonably good play (including having the wit to retreat from the overwhelming encounters), the game should probably aim for a 70% chance of success without PC loss for the adventure (assuming the now nearly-standard approach that an adventure covers about 2 levels).

(Edit: Of course, that 70% should be considered nothing more than a very rough guideline in any case!)