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Healing in Combat
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<blockquote data-quote="Kraydak" data-source="post: 5962642" data-attributes="member: 12306"><p>Go back to 1e for a different perspective yet again! In 1e/2e, there was Cure Light Wounds as a 1st level spell (2nd for druids in 1e, but druids were weird in a lot of ways, including their spell progression), and Cure Serious Wounds as a 4th level spell (Cure Crit at 5th, Heal at 6th, but 1e/2e didn't really go there). Neither scaled with level. You could not load a lower level spell in a higher level slot. Healing potions were NOT cheap commodities.</p><p></p><p>The results: the HP available in a fight were mostly the HP you brought into it. In combat healing was about keeping focus-fired targets alive, little more. This had some nice effects: you did not expect to heal up completely between fights. You couldn't. If you did, every little random encounter would require that you burn a Cure or two, and then sleep. At the same time, it made "walk-over" fights important. Sure, maybe the fight only did 10 damage to one of the fighters, who had 80 HP, BUT it would cost 2 Cure Lights to heal, out of 6 across the entire party. By constraining available healing SO much, you remove the 15 minute work-day by making it simply non-functional. You also free the Cleric from healing 24/7. Their healing was vital, but simply not available in a quantity which let them do it every (or even most) round of combat. This also means that you avoided Healing-Escalation. If the Cleric *can* provide huge amounts of healing, then encounters need to inflict huge amounts of damage to be stressful, which then requires that the Cleric *does* provide the healing.</p><p></p><p>In short: "fixing" the "heal-bot" aspect of Clerics by making healing cheap and easy just means that encounters expand to consume all the available healing. Instead, fix it by throttling healing, especially in combat. Throttling healing outside of combat mainly mitigates against the 15-minute work-day, but also makes low-level encounters significant. Which is a good thing. Such encounters give characters a chance to show off their high level power.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Kraydak, post: 5962642, member: 12306"] Go back to 1e for a different perspective yet again! In 1e/2e, there was Cure Light Wounds as a 1st level spell (2nd for druids in 1e, but druids were weird in a lot of ways, including their spell progression), and Cure Serious Wounds as a 4th level spell (Cure Crit at 5th, Heal at 6th, but 1e/2e didn't really go there). Neither scaled with level. You could not load a lower level spell in a higher level slot. Healing potions were NOT cheap commodities. The results: the HP available in a fight were mostly the HP you brought into it. In combat healing was about keeping focus-fired targets alive, little more. This had some nice effects: you did not expect to heal up completely between fights. You couldn't. If you did, every little random encounter would require that you burn a Cure or two, and then sleep. At the same time, it made "walk-over" fights important. Sure, maybe the fight only did 10 damage to one of the fighters, who had 80 HP, BUT it would cost 2 Cure Lights to heal, out of 6 across the entire party. By constraining available healing SO much, you remove the 15 minute work-day by making it simply non-functional. You also free the Cleric from healing 24/7. Their healing was vital, but simply not available in a quantity which let them do it every (or even most) round of combat. This also means that you avoided Healing-Escalation. If the Cleric *can* provide huge amounts of healing, then encounters need to inflict huge amounts of damage to be stressful, which then requires that the Cleric *does* provide the healing. In short: "fixing" the "heal-bot" aspect of Clerics by making healing cheap and easy just means that encounters expand to consume all the available healing. Instead, fix it by throttling healing, especially in combat. Throttling healing outside of combat mainly mitigates against the 15-minute work-day, but also makes low-level encounters significant. Which is a good thing. Such encounters give characters a chance to show off their high level power. [/QUOTE]
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