D&D 5E Healing Surges and 5E

[Li Shenron]

All you need to do is practice discipline with how you make combat mechanics work. You can keep abstract hit points and not cause brain aneurysms, but you also must restrain yourselves from lazy game design.

For instance, say that whenever you drop below 1/2 your max HP, you become 'bloodied.' While bloodied you cannot heal above half your max HP. Magical healing removes the bloodied condition.

Now make it so anything that logically requires serious physical contact only happens if the target is bloodied. Poisoned blades don't manage to deliver the venom until you're bloodied. Snakebites just manage to nick you, not inject anything. If you're on fire, it's just your sleeve or something. You can't get swallowed whole or impaled on a monster's spikes.

I don't think I'd like that... It just feels too much like a sort of story protection for the PCs. I am not at all against protecting the PC from dying, in fact I do it myself if the players want a low-lethality game, but this sounds like being protected from stuff to just happen to you, if you are still at max HP. Not for me, thanks.

 

[RangerWickett]

If you don't like plot immunity, hit points in general seem like a bad idea. They're kind of ideal for Men in Black-style "jump in the monster's throat and come out just fine" gaming.

Honestly, I'd prefer hit points to be only verve, dodge, and grit, and to use some sort of condition track to measure injuries, which can accumulate different ways. But in such a system, if I'm devoured by a monster, I'd expect to take an actual injury that takes longer than a few minutes to heal unless magic is involved.

 

[Klaus]

Don't fighters still get one?

Not really. Fighters get Second Wind, but in DDN it grants them temporary hit points that last for 5 minutes or until lost.

But it's not a stretch to house rule in (if it's not there as an optional module) a "Refocus" action that lets a character spend a Hit Die (and possibly recover the max result).

 

[Li Shenron]

Not really. Fighters get Second Wind, but in DDN it grants them temporary hit points that last for 5 minutes or until lost.

But it's not a stretch to house rule in (if it's not there as an optional module) a "Refocus" action that lets a character spend a Hit Die (and possibly recover the max result).

That basically means to remove the requirement of short rest for using hit dice.

Honestly, I'd prefer hit points to be only verve, dodge, and grit, and to use some sort of condition track to measure injuries, which can accumulate different ways.

That's more or less where (narratively) 5e is going, except that we don't have yet a system for tracking those injuries, but will likely be a module.

Problem is as I said before, a lot of people still can't (and won't) avoid to think of "damage" as something physical, and therefore of "hit points" as physical wounds. And that's because like it or not it's kind of natural to think of them this way. Just think about how many times we need to remind ourselves that "hit points are abstract" when discussing things... Unfortunately this means that even the designers will design a lot of things in the game based on the physical interpretation of damage and hit points, only to later have to climb mirrors to find complex explanations for keeping some consistency.

 

[Klaus]

That basically means to remove the requirement of short rest for using hit dice.

Not really, since a "Refocus" acton would allow for one HD during a fight. A short rest allow for as many as needed. You could also limit "Refocus" to once per rest.

But anyway, this is veering into house rule territory, which wasn't the OP's question.

 

[captpike]

They're present in the concept of Hit Dice, which you sepnd during a short (1 hour) rest to regain hit points.

hit dies are not healing surges, they overlap almost not at all. they scale very very poorly, 1 per level is just pathetic design, they start out as both random and too few, then go to too many.

because surges were both proportional in value to the characters total hp, and in number to the person's Con it allowed for a character toughness to be showed in a very good manor, as opposed to being entirely up to how many healing spells the party has.

this is not true for 5e because while classes do have different die sizes they are DICE, so a wizard could get more out of a d6 then a fighter out of a d12, in fact it is not unlikely to happen.
they also dont scale in number, a fighter does not have more then burn then a wizard, he goes from too few to too many just like every other class.

they also allow you to adventure without a healer from level 1, something that hit dice don't do.

surges also mean that you are not limited by how many healing spells you have, you are limited by how tough each person is, and that both makes more sense and works better.

 

[seti]

Things like 4e's healing surges, second wind (everyone got 1 use of second wind per encounter in 4e), and 5e's 'hit dice', to a certain extent, are all excellent mechanics that keep the game GOING. They represent how heroes in all heroic works of fiction seem to operate. Honestly, if someone can't grasp that hit points are not an accurate representation of injury, blood loss, etc. (nor are they MEANT to be) how can they grasp any rules of any game? All games use abstraction. Heck, games couldn't exist without abstraction. Here's another abstraction: Wizards forget spells when they cast them, but; reading a book for a few hours then going to bed makes them remember them until they cast them again. No one complains about that game abstraction ad nauseam on the internet. Here's another one: A dagger does 1d4. It's impossible to kill someone with 100 HP with one dagger strike in D&D. Yet, in reality, people die all the time when stabbed with a dagger. Even really experienced and skilled people.

Not having these methods of 'self-healing' in RPGs makes the game frustrating. And will often cut your game short because of nothing other than unlucky die rolls. What's more fun? Pretending to be a hero who spends most of his or her time doing cool, heroic things, or simulating a real person who would probably die within 30 seconds of engaging in melee or magical combat? Either die right then, or a few weeks later of infection. Or, if really lucky, spend weeks or months in physical therapy, having to go through multiple surgeries, and owing a fortune to health care providers after being dropped by their insurance company.

It's pretty clear to me which game I'd rather play.

 

[Li Shenron]

Not really, since a "Refocus" acton would allow for one HD during a fight. A short rest allow for as many as needed. You could also limit "Refocus" to once per rest.

Well I don't know about the once/fight limit, and as you say HR are open, but when you said "Refocus action" it sounded to me like you could take it every time you can take an action, i.e. once/round (subject of course to your max number of HD). What I meant, is that in that case, when you're not fighting then it's hard to tell players they can't just refocus freely, or once every 6 seconds, i.e. they wouldn't need to take a short rest anymore to use their HD healing...

 

[IndigoTraveler]

I like the idea of House Ruling Hit Dice as being Maximized when you use them.

 

[Stalker0]

So in reading some posts it looks like some people are unfamiliar with how healing surges actually worked, so here is a quick mechanics lesson.

Healing Surge: You gain roughly 5 + con per day (class and feats change this a bit). You recover them all on a long rest.

A Healing Surge = 1/4 of a character's max hitpoints. (as a quick aside: 4e characters got a lot of hitpoints at 1st level, but smaller amounts per level than equivalent 5e characters)

Most healing effects in 4e worked like this:

• Healing Potion: Spend a healing surge
• Healing Word (Cleric): Spend a healing surge and heal an additional 1d6
• Cure Serious Wounds (Cleric): Spend two healing surges
• Second Wind (1/encounter action available to all characters): Spend a healing surge and gain +2 to all defenses until the end of the next turn.

So most healing in 4e was done through the surge. This meant that most healing healed any character the same proportional amount. A Cure Serious Wounds was just as a useful to a 20th level fighter as it was to a 1st level one. Now certain healings did add a little extra on top (like the healing word's +1d6).... but for the most part the surge did the bulk of the work.

During a short rest (only 5 minutes in 4e but mostly identical to the 5e short rest), you could spend your own healing surges to heal up.

But here's the rub.... while 4e characters could heal up very quickly, both in and out of combat....they had a limit. Once your surges ran out....there was very very little that could actually heal you. If you didn't have a surge, most healing abilities just didn't work, it was only high level powers that would give you some healing.

So if we say a normal character had 8 surges (which I think is a bit high actually but its a nice clean number), than this meant a character had roughly HP = 3x their max hitpoints a day (100% from base hp + 200% from healing surges). Obviously some healing had that +1d6 kind of thing so added a little extra on top.