D&D 5E Should 5E have Healing Surges?

[CleverNickName]

But why would a character need magical healing for the abstraction of hit points that represent that the character has become exhausted from combat?

This is the root of the problem. Some people want hit points to represent exhaustion, others (like myself) want them to represent physical harm. Adding healing surges to the game forces us to accept a particlular definition of a fundamental game mechanic...a definition that a lot of people would reject.

 

[Lordhawkins9]

I never want to see healing surges again.

There seem to be quite a few people who want every class to be able to heal themselves. My reply to that is this: D&D has always been, and always should be, a TEAM activity. Healing is a role that needs filled and we already have a class to fill that role.

Don’t come up with core rules that take away from what a class should do.

Have people already forgotten the arguments of Wizards having the Knock spell making Thieves not needed? How about Clerics having Divine Power putting Fighters to shame? These are lessons we should have already learned.

In over 20 years of playing D&D, I have never had a campaign where someone complained about playing the Cleric. Never. In fact, my current campaign has two of them.

 

[Mengu]

Dirty bandana around the wound doesn't bother me in the least. I like that Jack Bauer can take 3 bullets in the chest, be tortured, waterlogged, drugged, get punched around, fall from a construction crane, get run down by a truck, and still be able to chase down terrorists on rooftops before his 24 hours is up. No magic, no miracles, just reality defying cinematic action. I fully understand, it's not everyone's cup of tea (or even the majority's), but I'd like that option to be there. Whether it's in the form of healing surges, or some other mechanic, doesn't matter so much.

 

[Oni]

I'm just going to go ahead and say it. The reason I like Healing Surges is specifically because of the 80's action hero effect. I want my fighters to be Bruce Willis like badasses ala Diehard. When used on their own they're not so much the ability to heal injury as ignore it.

I don't imagine that with the older style HP system that most people would describe your character getting knocked down to -1 has having a arm hewed off or the like, even though that is an injury that in which survival is feasible. And why not? Because if that person gets healed you can't really explain away the missing arm, there is another spell for that. So why would you describe injuries that can't jive with the HS system any more than you would the HP system? The only reason I can think to do it is to try to intentionally make the system look ludicrous.

Ultimately the HS is just more versatile. There are so many dials to adjust with it. Increase or decrease the number of Surges available. Change their value. Change their recover rate. Or what about this, change HP regained via surge minus magic to Temp HP and then have the old HP recovery rates.

Anyway, for the 'HP damage should actually be real physical wounds that take ages to recover' crowd, and who then primarily reject Healing Surges because the view them as some bizarre non-magical lizard-like regeneration. I want to know how you justify the 10th level fighter with 1 HP left that cans still run marathons, climb mountains, and do back flips without a care in the world. That's just the thing your system doesn't actually make any more sense without some sort of death spiral.

 

[Naszir]

This is the root of the problem. Some people want hit points to represent exhaustion, others (like myself) want them to represent physical harm. Adding healing surges to the game forces us to accept a definition of a fundamental game mechanic...a definition that a lot of people reject.

Actually I want hit points to model what they claim to be but in a better way. Hit points represent the ability to take physical damage, hit points also represent the ability of a character to exert themselves to avoid a lethal hit, hit points represent the luck that the sword hit a piece of metal rather than a piece of flesh and there are a bunch of other examples to go along with this.

How do you represent hit points as only physical harm? I'm not saying it is wrong but hit points as only physical damage is not the definition.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

See, that's the thing. The way I've always seen things, you aren't hurt enough to need bed rest until you've hit 0 and /can't heal/ for whatever reason; in 4e, you need to be out of or unable to activate HSs, and down. That's part of why HP loss doesn't make you fight worse - it's not doing enough to make you fight worse until you've dropped.

I mean, how else would you reconcile the HP yo-yo that's around in every edition of D&D? I mean, 3.x doesn't have explicit healing surges, but it does implicitly - how many potions and cure spells have you got?



Fair enough. I don't necessarily mean you're actively fighting them, only unconciously. It just bugs me when someone says they flat out don't make sense, because, well... It's demonstrably untrue. :/

IMO, this all ties in with conception of what HP is. If you're like me, and see HP as 95% grit, luck, and skill, and 5% wounds, and that those wounds are only "there" in the last bit of damage, and the actual nature of that damage is fluid based on effects that might be later used... it's a lot easier to accept HSs for nonmagical healing. When you're binding your wounds, you're not stuffing your intestines back in your stomach and tying a shirt over it, you'r wrapping bandages over a few fairly minor cuts and bruises.

There's another aspect to this as well. Damage is not a LINEAR thing. Take someone, and bruise them and scratch them and cut them, and even ring their bell a time or two, tire them out, etc and you can do that again and again and again and the next small bruise or cut isn't adding linearly to the character being dead. 100 scratches is barely worse than 1. Sure, EVENTUALLY you can be scratched to death or whatever, but hit points are just too simplistic for me. They imagine some sort of linear piling up of damage so that 10 small cuts makes you as dead as having your head severed.

At least with the HS sort of system it is MUCH LESS like that. Sure, even wounds that are unlikely to be fatal COULD disable you for a bit, but once you have a chance to catch your breath, apply a bit of ordinary first aid, possibly some minor magic, you're basically ALMOST back to normal. Your longer-term reserves are slowly being tapped out, so cumulative damage isn't insignificant, and a single massive attack CAN just kill you dead in your tracks, but you can go on for a good long time before the little stuff adds up.

Clearly ALL versions of D&D (except maybe at the lowest couple levels) are highly unrealistic in terms of how likely it is someone will get hit with that outright deadly gut-shot, but that's always been true and we all know that is pretty much a necessary genre conceit.

I just really despise the whole healing potion/healstick sort of gunk. I mean its cool to have a magic potion you can use to get healed, but with the pre-4e sort of notion of hit points you constantly had to be gulping down heal magic at every turn. It just made it way too 'cheap' of a thing, and the whole notion that you had before 3.5 of the party wandering around some adventure just happening to discover heal potions at just a fast enough rate to keep them going was the most utterly gamist thing in existence IMHO. Feh!

At least with 4e's HS you could spin your story as your character was tough and deeply resourceful and got through because of his own internal strength and heroism, and not because of some highly contrived flow of dime-a-dozen heal magics that show up at just the right moment or that you stockpile bags full of before you set off.

Can HS be a more cleverly presented mechanic? Sure. I don't think it is just perfect and I don't think it has to be presented exactly how it is now if there's a perfectly good way that it can be where I'll be happy and someone else can spin it their way too. There can be less surges, more hit points, less hit points, whatever. The basic concept is what's important, damage isn't a linear track and heroes don't accomplish great things by sucking down a potion every 5 minutes (well, unless you're Elric, but there's always room for that).

 

[Naszir]

I never want to see healing surges again.

There seem to be quite a few people who want every class to be able to heal themselves. My reply to that is this: D&D has always been, and always should be, a TEAM activity. Healing is a role that needs filled and we already have a class to fill that role.

Don’t come up with core rules that take away from what a class should do.

Have people already forgotten the arguments of Wizards having the Knock spell making Thieves not needed? How about Clerics having Divine Power putting Fighters to shame? These are lessons we should have already learned.

In over 20 years of playing D&D, I have never had a campaign where someone complained about playing the Cleric. Never. In fact, my current campaign has two of them.

Healing surges don't remove the need for a cleric. They represent that in some cases damage doesn't represent physical wounds.

In most cases you still need a cleric to use a healing surge.

Healing surges also are a way of getting around the fact that low-leveling healing in previous editions could bring a commoner at 1hp back up to full health but that same type of low-leveling healing would only mend a scratch on our heroic fighter.

 

[Herschel]

What I was saying is how does a commoner who at max health has 5 hp but was damaged and down to 1 hp is fully healed by CLW. However, our hero who at max health has 30 hp and is down to 1 hp only gets a scratch healed by CLW?

If you don't take the mortal wound until a hit drops you to 0hp why does it take days and weeks (if you like to play old school) to recover hit points that don't represent physical injuries?

Healing surges try to take this part of the game into account.

Exactly, however expecting a logical view of an emotional issue can be frustrating. They're just not very compatible.

 

[CleverNickName]

How do you represent hit points as only physical harm? I'm not saying it is wrong but hit points as only physical damage is not the definition.

Well, since you asked, I'll try to explain. Bear in mind, though, that this is what I do in my campaign...it isn't going to work for everyone. But it makes sense to me.

Hit points represent the amount of physical damage your character can sustain. Burns, cuts, broken bones, that sort of thing. Without magic, it can take days or weeks to recover fully.

Non-physical types of damage (including but not limited to exhaustion, poisons, mental distress, hunger, disease, drowning, and thirst) are represented as ability damage. Depending on the circumstance, you can recover by taking a breather, applying first aid, or being bedridden for months.

So, if your character is "damaged" by poison, that is represented by a temporary penalty to its related ability score (Constitution for lethal toxins, Dexterity for paralysis, Strength for sleep, etc.) The body itself was not harmed beyond a tiny pinprick, but the potentially lethal poison inhibits the character's ability to perform the way it is supposed to.

Similarly:

Exhaustion --> Str penalty, 0 Str = collapse
Mental distress --> Wis penalty, 0 Wis = unconscious
Suffocation --> Con penalty, 0 Con = dead
Hunger --> Con penalty
Thirst --> Con penalty
and so on.

In short: if something damages the physical body, it affects the hit points. If it just affects that body's ability to work effectively, then it is ability damage.

Again, I realize that this is not for everyone. But it is how my brain works when it comes to assessing damage. After all, you don't get exhausted or bummed out by dragon fire...you get burned.

 

[Herschel]

I never want to see healing surges again.

There seem to be quite a few people who want every class to be able to heal themselves. My reply to that is this: D&D has always been, and always should be, a TEAM activity. Healing is a role that needs filled and we already have a class to fill that role.

Don’t come up with core rules that take away from what a class should do.

It appears you really don't know how healing surges work by this post. You don't "heal yourself", as you put it. When you're in the thick of combat you don't have access to your surges unless you stop to catch your breath (second wind) which usually means getting clobbered without being able to retaliate. Outside of a very few adrenalin-pumping hits (powers that let you spend a surge) like a big hit in football OCs need a leader to heal them by triggering their surges, be it inspiration, divine intervention or whatever, and also the leaders make it more efficient because of their prowess.

I've seen 4E games without leaders and it's not pretty. Usually the quickest way to a TPK is going without a defender and leader.

After combat you can drink water, rest a bit, bind your wounds and grab some food but during combat you'd better have a leader worth his salt or you career is through in a hurry.