The Healing Paradox

[LostSoul]

You know how in the playtest Caves of Chaos it says that new monsters show up after 1d4 weeks?

What if that were 3 days?

What if it included reinforcements for weakened caves?

What if you didn't get XP for killing the new monsters?

I think healing to full overnight would be okay in that case. As it stands I think the currency in the playtest doesn't work.

 

[Gorgoroth]

That's a lot like an AD&D wizard spellbook that never gets stolen because the DM doesn't have the heart to mess with the wizard player that way. One of the keys to making such mechanics hurt is to make them not hurt so much that people will go to great lengths to avoid them.

Having played a wizard where this happened once (and was a major pain, but I stole another wizard's spellbook afterwards) : Mind meld ritual to re-write all your spells down, "resurrect previously cast spells", Mind-To-Pen. This is a good time for ritual magic to come into play. Same thing for a fighter who gets a nasty wound or a torn ligament : a very complex cleric ritual in town, incense and chanting in the church and all that jazz.

 

[rounser]

Just power up magical healing. It's not rocket surgery.

Traditionally:
Fireball and lightning bolt do 1d6/level. To many opponents at once.
Cure wounds do not scale by level, with the exception of heal, and affect a single ally, leading to metagame problems.

Hmm.

This precedent seems to have led to all sorts of hand-wringingly awful mechanical workarounds, when the problem could be solved by something as simple as "cure serious wounds restores half lost hit points to an area of effect" or "cure serious wounds restores 1d10 hp/level to all allies in range".

Solves multiple problems - no need for suspension-of-disbelief destroying mechanics or shout healing class concepts, gives the cleric back his spells, improves in-combat survivability (because the monsters generally won't have access to healing spells) etc.

Hmm...

 

[LostSoul]

Solves multiple problems - no need for suspension-of-disbelief destroying mechanics or shout healing class concepts, gives the cleric back his spells, improves in-combat survivability (because the monsters generally won't have access to healing spells) etc.

Doesn't solve the "full healing overnight" problem, though.

 

[Gorgoroth]

.

I like the idea that you heal half your wounds overnight. That way it could take a few days' rest to get back to full, but you'll still want some clericy goodness to top you up in the morning so you can fight the good fight

I don't like healing to full overnight without magic, but neither do I like the cleric being a healbot and spending most of his daily resources to keep the fighter standing with his bags of HP.

Don't have any strong feelings about HD, variable healing yet...could work. There's gotta be a balance between realism and expedited / fun play...maybe a scale where DMs can explicitly set the grittyness factor for their campaign.

 

[rounser]

Doesn't solve the "full healing overnight" problem, though.

The idea was to point out that it appears that there are simple, much more palatable alternatives. That they could ditch suspension-of-disbelief challenged mechanics like that for powered up magical healing. Full regain of hit points on a rest is, for me, a "creates far more problems than it solves" fix, when supe-ing up magical healing may be all that's required.

If the 5E designers don't resolve this issue, then that's their choice.

 

[LostSoul]

You ditch suspension-of-disbelief challenged mechanics like that for powered up magical healing. Full regain of hit points on a rest is a "creates more problems than it solves" fix, when supe-ing up magical healing may be all that's required.

I don't understand. If you're saying that natural healing overnight is a suspension-of-disbelief challenged mechanic, I agree. (Or shout-based healing, for that matter.) The colour is off. But in terms of how you play the game, how does increasing the potency of magical healing keep one from regaining all HP overnight? You get into what I consider the worst feature of 4E - the ability to refresh all (well, most) of your character's resources after an Extended Rest.

edit: In response to your edit.

The idea was to point out that it appears that there are simple, much more palatable alternatives. That they could ditch suspension-of-disbelief challenged mechanics like that for powered up magical healing. Full regain of hit points on a rest is, for me, a "creates far more problems than it solves" fix, when supe-ing up magical healing may be all that's required.

If the 5E designers don't resolve this issue, then that's their choice.

Okay, I see where you're coming from. Like I say above, that does get rid of suspension-of-disbelief destroying mechanics, but it doesn't resolve the "full healing overnight" problem - which is, as far as I understand it, not simply a suspension-of-disbelief problem, but one of challenge and strategic play. (Challenges are reduced because healing is easy, assuming no changes to monsters in the playtest; strategic play is still weak because of the "optimal solution" of full healing overnight. Those two are related, but not the same: if monsters were tougher, you'd have encounter-based challenge but miss out on a certain strategic play because the optimal solution still exists.)

 

[rounser]

I don't understand. If you're saying that natural healing overnight is a suspension-of-disbelief challenged mechanic, I agree. (Or shout-based healing, for that matter.) The colour is off. But in terms of how you play the game, how does increasing the potency of magical healing keep one from regaining all HP overnight? You get into what I consider the worst feature of 4E - the ability to refresh all (well, most) of your character's resources after an Extended Rest.

It doesn't solve it - if they don't ditch the full overnight healing mechanic then it's still there. But if you significantly power up healing magic, then you can achieve much the same desired result (everyone near full hp, more of the time) without the silliness factor that comes with full overnight hp regain.

Which removes the need for the full overnight heal mechanic in the first place. Which means in theory they can ditch it. So do A instead of B, not in addition to. Make sense?

 

[Tony Vargas]

A 'wound' system would be ideal for an optional 'gritty' module. In normal play, characters take hp damage and heal it up very quickly, usually being at or near full hps at the start of any meaningful fight, and recovering completely after an extended rest (which might not be a day if campaign pacing is atypical). Curses, Diseases, serious wounds and the like might exist, but they'd be specific to the danger that inflicts them, and take time and/or skill checks and/or saves and/or rituals to get rid of.

As a bolt-on module, you could have automatic rules for 'wounds,' to represent impairing wounds. You might take a 'light' wound when bloodied, a 'serious' wound when dropped, and a 'critical' wound if dropped without being bloodied first, CdG'd, or hit while dropped. The same mechanisms that let you recover from 'afflictions' work on 'wounds,' wounds are just a lot more common with the module in use.

 

[Chris_Nightwing]

Lots of interesting discussions, and my mind has come round to a couple of conclusions:

Players will not push forward with low hitpoints, because it risks death. They will push forward with minor penalties however, because they still have their hitpoint buffer before death. A wound system of some kind sounds like it would better incentivise pushing forward, albeit slightly less effectively. The simplest thing I can come up with off the top of my head is a hit threshold: take more than X damage in a single hit and get a wound that applies a -1 to attacks/checks/saves based off of a specific ability. Then I would be happy for a rest to restore all HP and 1 wound.

For cleric spells, I think that restoration of HP would be best done in parallel with other spells (more lay on hands than junk a spell slot for CLW). Healing of actual wounds would be a tactical choice - do you get rid of that -1 on a set of attacks/checks/saves or just cast bless to negate it (and provide a bonus to everyone else) in the short-term?