Healing Outside of Combat

[MarkB]

For the record, I feel this is a bad feat - there is no need to encourage players to take multiple short rests. Destroys the pacing in my opinion. It also lessens the comparative advantage of the bards short rest healing buff.

Allowing players to use healing powers during short rests allows them to maximise the effectiveness of their healing surges, which means they'll be able to take on more encounters during the course of a day. In my experience, having a party limp back to town or camp in the dungeon halfway through the day because they're too battered to continue breaks the pacing far more fundamentally than allowing them a little more time between combats.

If the extra rests bother you, consider introducing a house rule to gain the best of both worlds - that characters may use Healing / Inspiring Word as at-will powers outside of combat, but must still take a short rest to recover them for use in combat. That way, your PCs get the healing the game assumes they'll be getting, but without standing around for long periods.

 

[Doctor Proctor]

For the record, I feel this is a bad feat - there is no need to encourage players to take multiple short rests. Destroys the pacing in my opinion. It also lessens the comparative advantage of the bards short rest healing buff.

Well, isn't this feat only for Clerics? In that case, if a Bard was the only Leader you had, then they would be depending on things like his healing buff for short rests.

Secondly, just because someone can cast a heal spell during a short rest doesn't mean they have to. I play a Dragonborn Fighter and so I get to add my CON mod to my healing surge value. There have been quite a few encounters where that little bump has been enough to mean that I don't need healing from the Cleric at all, and can just take care of it with my own surges. This way, I can save the party 5 minutes by not eating up two heals that I don't need. Having a Bard that could further add to my natural healing surge value makes it even less frequent that I will need additional healing spells cast on me.

 

[Starfox]

If the extra rests bother you, consider introducing a house rule to gain the best of both worlds - that characters may use Healing / Inspiring Word as at-will powers outside of combat, but must still take a short rest to recover them for use in combat. That way, your PCs get the healing the game assumes they'll be getting, but without standing around for long periods.

I think this would be a better solution yes. An easier solution is to strongly discourage multiple short rests in a row (making this feat pretty useless), and balance my encounters accordingly.

I am much more of a narrativist than a simulationist or gamist, and multiple short rests in a row breaks immersion for me and my group.

 

[jorrit]

I think this would be a better solution yes. An easier solution is to strongly discourage multiple short rests in a row (making this feat pretty useless), and balance my encounters accordingly.

I am much more of a narrativist than a simulationist or gamist, and multiple short rests in a row breaks immersion for me and my group.

Then don't talk about this. What I do is to just assume an average roll for the cleric healing power (i.e. 3 for an 1d6) and then add that (plus wisdom modifier) to the healing surges that they spend while in a short rest. It shouldn't break immersion at all. When you do a short rest you generally have to handle healing surges anyway. So just add a fixed constant to it.

Greetings,

 

[CapnZapp]

I am aware the rules allow multiple short rests in a row, but to me this has always been very jarring.

Wasn't the purpose of a short rest to separate encounters? Thus taking a short rest after taking a short rest breaks this concept as a narrative tool.

in my opinion 4E should decide whether a short rest is a narrative tool or whether it is a defined unit of time.

In the first case, a short rest can take as short or as long as the player, DM and story wants and needs. And taking two short rests in a row doesn't make sense.

In the second case, a short rest is exactly five minutes. If you rest for ten minutes, you get double the benefit.

As it is now, we're stuck somewhere in the middle.



As for myself, I am very much in favor of the first way of using short rests; as a break between encounters. As a way of ending one chapter in a book and turning the page to begin another. The time between action scenes in a move you never get to see.



(I should probably add than neither interpretation is "wrong". Just because I feel one way is better doesn't mean you have to. But one thing is clear: saying a short rest is an ill-defined amount of time and encouraging its use as a narrative tool doesn't jive well with the concept of using it mechanically to stack several short rests on top of each other)

 

[DracoSuave]

Why should the rulebook decide for you whether a short rest is 'narrative' or 'simulationist' (gah I hate these distinctions).


You're a DM. Figure it out for your group--that's your job. The ruleset makes it easier for -you- to decide what's best for your group and your story-telling style. If you don't like it a certain way, then do it a different way. They left it open in that regard -on purpose-. Asking them to nail it down for one group unnecessarily alienates the other camp -for no real gain.-

 

[Doctor Proctor]

Why should the rulebook decide for you whether a short rest is 'narrative' or 'simulationist' (gah I hate these distinctions).


You're a DM. Figure it out for your group--that's your job. The ruleset makes it easier for -you- to decide what's best for your group and your story-telling style. If you don't like it a certain way, then do it a different way. They left it open in that regard -on purpose-. Asking them to nail it down for one group unnecessarily alienates the other camp -for no real gain.-

Pretty much. There's a lot of things in this edition that are vague, like some of the alignment stuff, and I think it was done purposefully to allow people to come up with their own rules.

In the case of the short rests, if you like using them as a narrative tool, then just say "Okay, we're taking a short rest now. Use whatever healing powers you have to get back up to fighting shape so we can continue on." It's not going to break the game, and from the sound of it, it will actually help your game if you prefer to use short rests as a narrative device.

 

[Starfox]

Then don't talk about this. What I do is to just assume an average roll for the cleric healing power (i.e. 3 for an 1d6) and then add that (plus wisdom modifier) to the healing surges that they spend while in a short rest. It shouldn't break immersion at all. When you do a short rest you generally have to handle healing surges anyway. So just add a fixed constant to it.

The problem is, to use the feat, the cleric HAS to take 2 short rests in a row (minimum). Otherwise, he begins the next encounter with no healing powers, clearly not an acceptable situation if fighting is expected.

4E basically only gives healing powers for use in combat. Noncombat, short rest healing is assumed to handle things. Not very surprisingly, the designers have found that this is not how people play; they want to continue to use healing powers out of combat, like you did in all earlier editions. So the implement the option to do so.

For the bard, this is the inherent +Cha on healing on a short rest. A good solution as it does not require more than one short rest to work. However, from level 6 onwards, it is still worse than actually taking multiple rests and using majestic word repeatedly.

For the cleric, this feat is the answer, and it requires a series of short rests to work, which to me breaks one of the implied rules of 4E; you always take one (and only one) short rest between encounters.

A much better solution to me would have been a feat that allows unlimited uses of leader inherent healing powers between combats. Perhaps even maximizing them as this feat does. This would not work with the bard inherent, which would need to be rewritten (or the bard otherwise compensated), but it is all around a much better idea.

 

[Tuft]

The problem is, to use the feat, the cleric HAS to take 2 short rests in a row (minimum). Otherwise, he begins the next encounter with no healing powers, clearly not an acceptable situation if fighting is expected.

Yes, doing a "fight 1 - rest - heal - rest - heal - rest - heal - rest - fight 2" sequence feels awfully contrived and, well, silly. It's the kind of thing that would merit a strip in the old Murphy's Rules comic...

 

[jorrit]

Yes, doing a fight - rest1 - heal - rest - heal - rest - heal - rest - fight2 sequence feels awfully contrived and, well, silly. It's the kind of thing that would merit a strip in the old Murphy's Rules comic...

If you look at it that way it may sound silly. But there is another way to look at this. If the players are more wounded then a single short rest is not going to be sufficient to bring them to full health again. So from a narrative viewpoint you could say that heavily wounded players require multiple short rests (giving the cleric a chance to use healing word a few times).

Greetings,