D&D 5E How has 5e solved the Wand of CLW problem?

[Ebony Dragon]

I find the "cure light wounds problem" to be the lesser of two evils.

When your hero suffers numerous grievous wounds from a tough battle and just barely pulls through at least it is fantasy world believable that magic is what healed them up and is letting them push on to the next encounter. Saying "We sit down to rest for an hour and now my broken bones and skewered kidney have healed up great" is a way bigger problem to me.

 

[Remathilis]

I find the "cure light wounds problem" to be the lesser of two evils.

When your hero suffers numerous grievous wounds from a tough battle and just barely pulls through at least it is fantasy world believable that magic is what healed them up and is letting them push on to the next encounter. Saying "We sit down to rest for an hour and now my broken bones and skewered kidney have healed up great" is a way bigger problem to me.

Ah yes, this canard.

The problem with this little scenario is you assume the maximum damage potential (damaged bones and organs, which the hp system does not represent) and minimum recuperation action (sit and wait). It ignores the obvious middle: wounds that a superficial or minor being treated with some form of first aid.

Hp is an abstraction that almost always falls apart and has since time unmentionable. (Remember: an AD&D pc can recover from a broken bone or pierced organ too, it's just measured in days rather than hours. )

 

[Ebony Dragon]

Hp is an abstraction that almost always falls apart and has since time unmentionable.

Yes, of course. I just don't like how its shortcomings are flaunted front and center in a system that lets characters heal 1/2 HP on short rests and all of it just from a long rest.

Yes it's also unrealistic that resting for a week (in 3e) could heal these types of injuries, but since magic will almost always be used as soon as you take 1 full day of downtime anyways it rarely was shoved in my face. Magic could be the reason and that made sense.

Either you describe every combat as just just glancing blows off the armor and near misses, even when the monster just pounded you for 43 damage, or you give cool bone crunching descriptions of the battle but somehow hand wave it away as soon as a short rest comes up. It feels super strange to me and in a bad way.

 

[Remathilis]

Yes it's also unrealistic that resting for a week (in 3e) could heal these types of injuries, but since magic will almost always be used as soon as you take 1 full day of downtime anyways it rarely was shoved in my face. Magic could be the reason and that made sense.

That did assume magic was available. If the group is ambushed in the wilderness and the cleric is pulped, the fighter and rogue still healed their 1 hp per level overnight.

Either you describe every combat as just just glancing blows off the armor and near misses, even when the monster just pounded you for 43 damage, or you give cool bone crunching descriptions of the battle but somehow hand wave it away as soon as a short rest comes up. It feels super strange to me and in a bad way.

Considering D&D lacks an official wound system, I've always steered clear of describign major injuries. The monster deals 43 points of damage and causes your arm to break; well, as long as you have 44 hp when you take it, you can still deliver a full-attack (using a two-handed weapon, two weapons, or a shield) with no penalty because of your "broken" arm. There is no penalty to speed for taking an arrow to the knee, no concussion to the head penalizes your skills or spells prepared, and no organ damage causes you to lay screaming on the floor until a medic comes over with cure spells. At a certain point, it becomes like Mortal Kombat's X-ray attacks; you take a maiming wound described in graphic detail and then a minute later get up and fight like nothing is wrong.

THAT stretches my credibility far more than glancing blows.

 

[Quartz]

I can't yet speak for 5E but I enjoyed the 3E system as it encouraged players to spend XP on creating these items. Yes, your cleric has crafted wands of healing / curing blindness / etc and has scribed scrolls of many spells. But she - like the mage - is now a level or two behind the fighter-types.

 

[Remathilis]

I can't yet speak for 5E but I enjoyed the 3E system as it encouraged players to spend XP on creating these items. Yes, your cleric has crafted wands of healing / curing blindness / etc and has scribed scrolls of many spells. But she - like the mage - is now a level or two behind the fighter-types.

While in theory you are correct, I found the XP loss was barely a blip. There was two reasons for that.

XP costs were often trivial. A wand of CLW was 30 Xp; or 1/50th of a standard CR 5 monster's reward to a 5th level party. (So a 5th level cleric could take on a CR 5 monster with 49 other guys and still break even on the XP needed to make his wand of CLW). Put another way, a 5th level PC cleric would have to make 167 wands before his fighter buddy gained 6th level.

Secondly, even if he did, the XP table with built with a catch-up mechanic. The cleric would get XP as one level lower, so monsters would be worth more. If he was in a core-four group and slew a CR 5 (again), he's get 1/4th of 1500 (375) while his fighter buddy would get 1/4 of 1200 (300). The cleric would catch up eventually.

XP cost was no obstacle to cheap items like potions and scrolls. They only gave pause to large items (and usually they recouped that in the benefit of the large item). For most people, it was a non-issue.

 

[delericho]

XP costs were often trivial. A wand of CLW was 30 Xp; or 1/50th of a standard CR 5 monster's reward to a 5th level party. (So a 5th level cleric could take on a CR 5 monster with 49 other guys and still break even on the XP needed to make his wand of CLW). Put another way, a 5th level PC cleric would have to make 167 wands before his fighter buddy gained 6th level.

Yep. We found that our Artificer very occasionally spent one session a level behind the rest of the party as a result of crafting. (Then he died and was raised, and so spent much longer behind, but that was another thing entirely.)

Secondly, even if he did, the XP table with built with a catch-up mechanic. The cleric would get XP as one level lower, so monsters would be worth more.

I think that was actually a change from 3.0e to 3.5e. Though I might be misremembering - it's a long time since I've looked at the 3.0e DMG.

 

[TwoSix]

As I see it, the core issue is that when you hand the controls over when to stop and rest for the day to the players, you will have to accept that the players will want to play it safe and rest even when you the DM knows they don't have to and in fact, resting will lessen/destroy dramatic tension later on.

What the game needs is some way to force the players to keep driving when the fuel gauge is in the red, as it were.

Pretty much this. The 5-minute work day is a natural process driven by common sense. Who tries to do something difficult and potentially life-threatening while being at less than 100% effectiveness if they don't have to? Even a hero would only do that if something bigger than his own life was on the line, which is why I find the standard idea of a 4-6 encounter dungeon crawl rather crazy. It's just not something you can support narratively without a constant raising of the stakes.

In my ideal D&D resource model, characters would mostly juggle the use of always usable and short-term recharging abilities. Combat encounters would be assumed to be risky and only entered into if no other recourse could be found. Hit points would be the measure of fighting readiness. Long term fatigue and injury would be measured by the accrual of negative conditions after combat. These negative conditions would be removed only by the expenditure of a long term resource (say, a option or scroll). More potent resources, like powerful spells, would not be renewed per day. Only the use of extended downtime, in the form of creating potions, scrolls, or other consumable magical items, would allow the use of potent magic.

This would put the front-line characters in the position of handling most of the combat risk, and the more overtly magical classes in the position of problem solvers, expending limited resources when necessary to bypass otherwise intractable obstacles.

 

[Quartz]

While in theory you are correct, I found the XP loss was barely a blip. There was two reasons for that.

XP costs were often trivial. A wand of CLW was 30 Xp; or 1/50th of a standard CR 5 monster's reward to a 5th level party. (So a 5th level cleric could take on a CR 5 monster with 49 other guys and still break even on the XP needed to make his wand of CLW). Put another way, a 5th level PC cleric would have to make 167 wands before his fighter buddy gained 6th level.

Yes, so the GM ensured they got plenty of use. And don't forget item saving throws. Plus Disjunction. You may recall from previous threads I was big on item churn.

Secondly, even if he did, the XP table with built with a catch-up mechanic. The cleric would get XP as one level lower, so monsters would be worth more. If he was in a core-four group and slew a CR 5 (again), he's get 1/4th of 1500 (375) while his fighter buddy would get 1/4 of 1200 (300). The cleric would catch up eventually.

This is precisely why it was so useful: the item-crafters were never too far behind.

 

[Chocolategravy]

The problem with the wand of Cure Light Wounds was that players could buy them, easily, and it allowed them to heal up to full after every fight without expending any meaningful resources. The item was ludicrously cheap, compared to the expected-wealth-by-level chart.

That problem is fixed in 5E, because magic items aren't for sale.

So with less healing available less damage gets done in a fight so fights are much less interesting, right?

The reality is that characters have a lot more healing available to them in other ways that aren't called cure light wounds wands, but work a lot like it for free.

- Fighters have several cure light wounds per day built into the class.
- The popular healer feat tax is a cure light wounds wand that works on each character several times a day.
- The popular leader feat tax is a temp hp wand that works several times a day.
- Every character has HD for free cure light wounds several times a day.
- Most classes have healing or like barbarian simply ignore half the damage dealt to them.
- And importantly, you get full HP back overnight which will often add up to an awful lot of free healing over the course of an adventure.