Can you get too much healing?

[Mengu]

In other words, I need the game to allow the possibility of character death in just about any encounter.

I definitely do not need a game where you first play merely to save your resources and then give you an easy way out of having to play the end-game, where you might actually run out.

The current design of the game is a resource management game (actually, it always was). You want this to not be the case. Also the current design asks that you have a mix of easy, standard, and difficult encounters. You don't want this either.

How about the following rules:

1. Everyone gets 2 healing surges at heroic, 3 at paragon, 4 at epic level. This is not modified by constitution, and feats that add to this value are out of the game.
2. At the end of a short rest, you regain all hit points and healing surges.
3. All daily powers become encounter powers.

This will remove the resource management aspect of the game, and you can make every encounter a difficult encounter. Since everyone will only have 2 healing surges to trigger, they will not resort to multi-classing for extra ways to trigger healing surges. If someone is in a bad spot and getting hit a lot, they will run out of healing surges to trigger quickly, and run the risk of death.

If you still want to keep some resource management aspect, you could scratch rule 3 and leave the daily powers as daily.

 

[KarinsDad]

This is what I need your help on. Exploring options.

Well, you did not like my suggestion on mixing encounters up.

Here is another suggestion.

Often use n+1 and n+2 encounters, but rarely use n or n+3 encounters.

The idea is to to challenge the players without having the high risk TPK situation that heavily sucks resources in a single encounter.

n encounters are too simple and you've stated that you do not have time for that.

n+3 encounters are too hard and by having them, you are forcing your PCs to go through their daily resources including their daily heal resources.

The game is designed for multiple encounters of differing difficulty. So, you can still do that, but narrow the difficulty into a range that you feel comfortable with but does not go through many daily resources in a single encounter often.

Add to that interesting terrain and interesting monster groupings and it should help. If not, I'm not quite sure what you are looking for.

 

[mneme]

First of all, thanks for such an involved answer.

I live to serve

Assuming you have practically endless triggers for healing surges, a starting character has anything between 50 hp (lo-Con Wizard) and 140 hp (hi-Con Fighter) in total.

If you have endless triggers -and- endless tempo, sure.

I'm not talking about one-shot kills. I realize D&D isn't about that.

FWIW, I am, more or less -- significant (not actually endless) healing doesn't matter that much if a PC is killed via damage--and they can get there in one turn or nearly one turn.

I really need to find me a 4E alternative where monsters can still kill adventurers...

So why not build encounters that can kill adventurers -- even the ones you have?

People have given you the tools for this -- encounters with false endings and multi-stage monster entry, monsters that keep hitting downed adventurers to try to bring them from "unconcious" to "dead" before a healing word gets them moving again, encounters with tactics that try to divide and conquer where PCs have to think their way out but with the large reserves 4e gives them making this avoid being a save-or-die or killer GM issue; minions (which if they can swarm a PC, do plenty enough damage to kill them rather than just wound them, making this a tactical challenge, not an endurance one). Your players, by exploiting some of the more powerful feats in the game (and yes, I know that muliticlass feats are extroadinarily powerful), loading up on daily powers, and defaulting to the "5 minute day" (which lets them exploit their daily powers rather than saving them for when they'll -really- need them) are fighting above their weight class, but what this really means is that when the fight ends, they're just getting started. Fine -- make the fight longer by adding extra monsters, but having them show up late, thus extending the threat point, but not the second by second deadliness. This doesn't do much about the fact that they're getting to trade up in power with a 5 minute day and thus not doing any of the per-day resource management that the daily/encounter split is intended for -- but you let them get away with this (and you seem content to), you need to throw out encounters that are long enough to challenge the party, so they're making real decisions; not whether to throw healing, but -where-.

And, of course, have the monsters use intelligent tactics.

 

[mneme]

And unlike running out of daily powers, there are no lesser Encounter versions to fall back on. (Well, there is one. Second Wind. And there are healing potions.

And potentially Adventurer's Vault "healing surge" items. And the clerical heals.

What would you do if the entire party were dwarves, after all?

Much like Daily powers. Sure, they're the biggest guns, but how much bigger than encounter powers are they really?

A lot, actually, for classes that rely on dailys -- barbarians, wizards, etc. They deal.

I think a lot of this discussion relies on your unwillingness to kill characters off, frankly.

The game you're setting up -- what appears to be "the monsters mob the party, the party heals and damages the monster, repeat until tpk or all the monsters are dead" is, IMO, a trap. It's a fundamentally boring option, and one that can't be made interesting no matter how you tweak the numbers.

What you -want- is a situation where instead, you have "the monsters move around and try to put the characters into deadly peril. The party tries to prevent this. If the monsters succeed, they get to kill someone; if the party succeeds, keeping the monsters from clumping up, then the party will survive without killing someone". The game isn't about the overall accumulation of game, nor is the excitement -- it's about positioning and threat. If the monsters win the positioning game -- even if they haven't gotten anywhere -near- exausting the party's resources, they should likely get to kill somoene -- but the party, most of the time, should be able to prevent this. But you have to be willing to kill someone in one turn to make this work -- it's how you make the game exciting! Be mean!

 

[Trebor62]

CappnZapp how do you and your group feel about abstracting the easy encounters rather than playing them out? I'm thinking that you could just assume that so many surges and Healing powers would be spent in the easy encounters and deduct that from the surge totals and Healing powers available and then start right into the main big encounter. This way the party could head into the big encounter with some healing resources expended without spending the time on the easy encounters that it sounds like you guys dont have.

Or you could offer a choice between deducting some daily powers and or healing surges as being spent during the abstracted easy encounters. This could even be decided by your players before you meet to play to speed things up.

Off hand I am thinking between 1/4 and 1/2 of the dailies and surges would be spent on the easy encounters, leaving 1/2 to 3/4 available for the final encounter. The trade off being spend more dailies (ending those unplayed easy encounters faster) and save more healing or use more healing and preserve the dailies, or some of each.

Good luck hope this idea helps.

 

[Cadfan]

I want "the beef" in almost every encounter. That is after all why I'm having them.

Every fight should involve risk. Ok.

What does risk mean? Does it mean that there's a chance that at least one character will die? What is the source of that chance? Does it have to mean that there's a chance that a character will die due to random rolls of the dice? Or does it mean that there's a chance that a character will die if you don't play intelligently? Obviously its a gradient, but some people will feel that characters dying due to random throws of the die is unfair, and will prefer to be judged by their skill and teamwork. Other people will feel that if skill and teamwork can prevent character death, there's no real risk because they'll just do the smart thing in any given situation and no one will die.

4e has adopted a system that is very favorable for people who feel that character death due to random throws of the die are unfair, and who prefer to be judged on skill and teamwork. It did so by creating a game where characters are regularly injured, even critically injured, even on the ground bleeding out injured, but where their team as a whole almost always has the resources available to rescue them or even to plan in advance and prevent any one character from taking more injury than can be healed.

The ultimate result of this is that, if you HAVE skill and teamwork, (almost) no one will die.

If you don't... then yeah, characters die. But almost always in contexts where, looking back, you can see things you could have done differently and prevented the character's death.

I guess the upshot of this is that "the beef" in an encounter in 4e is supposed to be the chance to use your abilities and work with your allies to accomplish something difficult. Difficult doesn't mean "random odds create a chance that you will die." It means "we worked hard to get this."

So to the extent that you feel that the player's proficiency and careful play is negating "the beef" in your encounters, you may be wrong. They may be having a fine time with everything, may be feeling the tension of having to plan carefully and work together. The fact that they DO work together doesn't mean that doing so wasn't tense, interesting, and fun for them. It might, but it doesn't necessarily. Depends a lot on personality type.

If you don't like this form of excitement (and if neither do your players), and you're not willing to budge on running multiple encounters per day, you may need another game system or significant changes to 4e. Alternately, you may need to talk to your players about their builds and insistence on rest. 4e can do one fight a day gaming, but it looks like your group has carefully extracted the only way to exploit one fight a day gaming, and given it to every character. My 10th level group, by contrast, can't nova simply because all of our best abilities are tied up in incompatible duration powers, and we can't trigger more than a handful of healing surges per fight.

It sounds like what you really should want is a game where all non-at-will abilities are per encounter, including healing surges. That would optimize the sense of danger per encounter and make the number of encounters per day perfectly scaleable. Of course, it would also destroy the idea of resource management across the course of the day or multiple encounters. But both you and your players seem to be carefully avoiding any use of that aspect of the game system, so that wouldn't be a loss to you.

 

[mneme]

The ultimate result of this is that, if you HAVE skill and teamwork, (almost) no one will die.

If you don't... then yeah, characters die. But almost always in contexts where, looking back, you can see things you could have done differently and prevented the character's death.

Yes. This.

It sounds like what you really should want is a game where all non-at-will abilities are per encounter, including healing surges. That would optimize the sense of danger per encounter and make the number of encounters per day perfectly scaleable. Of course, it would also destroy the idea of resource management across the course of the day or multiple encounters. But both you and your players seem to be carefully avoiding any use of that aspect of the game system, so that wouldn't be a loss to you.

This seems like an excellent way to reconfigure 4e to not have per-day resource management, and instead only have per-encounter resource management. You might want to also have action points reset every encounter, daily item powers reset per encounter, etc. You'd want to have healing surges be a ratio of normal surges -- eg, characters get 1/3 of their "undamaged" surges (3 encounters/day is about what you expect for a typical party that isn't encountering cakewalks anyway, at least at low levels), and either limit feats that grant extra powerful dailies (like, yes, leader MC feats) or design encounters that act as a mini-day as I express above.

OTOH, the issue may be that CZ is fine with per-day abilities, but is having problems designing encounters that are challenging -if- they're going to be the only encounter that day, rather than "that was boring, let's rest". Which pushes, IMO, things back to the "designing challenging encounters for a party with a lot of healing" question that I've been focusing on.

 

[CapnZapp]

Thanks cadfan and mneme; you got it.

Yes, I am dissatisfied with healing surges as the currency for the resource management game (replacing attack spells in previous editions).

Why? Because the difference between having these resources and not having them is implemented in a crude and uninteresting way, at least to me.

Any joy I had when I realized Wizards had solved the issue for attack spells quickly vanished into disappointment when I saw the implementation of surges, and specifically what happens when you run out (i.e. the air goes out of the entire game).

I am honestly intrigued why it seems so few of my fellow players have the same feelings as I do. I would like to know how so many people accept that the "choice" when you run out of resources is equally non-existant as in 3E, especially considering the neat solution for the spells.

One thing is for sure; if I am going to retain the resource management game, it needs to be more exciting than staring at a number slowly ticking down from 12 to 0.

In 3E, dwindling resources had a profound impact on the game: once you used that Fireball or Meteor Swarm, it was gone. The difference wasn't just a number on the paper - it was a change that was physically present both in-game (your PC losing capabilities) and out of game (your playing piece using up its abilities).

I miss that.

Perhaps I should try adding some kind of penalty for being downed (reaching zero hp). This as a way to make encounters count for something; more than having your number tick down a step or two.

Yes, I have already done away with milestones and having to keep track of action points and daily item uses.

If I can prevent a character from using half a dozen surges in a single fight, and can dampen the impact of running out of surges, then there might be hope for 4E still!

As I see it, I share the design goals of 4E. I just want to reach them without having to sacrifice encounter excitement, and without reducing the "resource management game" to trivialities.

(More later... need to go)

 

[Doctor Proctor]

Just as an experiment, perhaps you should a one-off sometime to see how stringing together 3-5 encounters works for you PC's. You can even tell them ahead of time. Something like say, their PC's have been captured and imprisoned, but create a skill challenge that allows them to get out and get their weapons. Then make them fight their way out of the prison.

Because they're fighting their way OUT instead of IN, they won't have an opportunity to leave and rest. They will have to push on manage dwindling resources. If they know about this ahead of time, and they're decently smart tactics wise, they'll conserve some of those daily healing triggers, which means that they won't have the ability to "heal nova" in the earlier fights. If you follow the DMG guidelines and maybe do a N-1, two N's and an N+1 (or maybe bump everything a level if their healing seems a bit strong) and perhaps save an "optional" encounter to throw at them if they breeze through the first couple, you should start seeing a lot of bloodied PC's and probably some tense moments when someone drops and they have to decide whether or not to get him back up or try to finish the fight.

Now, if you decide to try this, make sure you keep all the normal rules in place (Action Points, Milestones, etc...). If you try this, I bet you'll see that most of the encounters will actually be quite challenging as they will have to constantly make hard choices about whether to use a Daily power (Healing or otherwise) to finish an encounter, or save it for one of the other ones down the road.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Thanks cadfan and mneme; you got it.

Yes, I am dissatisfied with healing surges as the currency for the resource management game (replacing attack spells in previous editions).

Why? Because the difference between having these resources and not having them is implemented in a crude and uninteresting way, at least to me.

Any joy I had when I realized Wizards had solved the issue for attack spells quickly vanished into disappointment when I saw the implementation of surges, and specifically what happens when you run out (i.e. the air goes out of the entire game).

I am honestly intrigued why it seems so few of my fellow players have the same feelings as I do. I would like to know how so many people accept that the "choice" when you run out of resources is equally non-existant as in 3E, especially considering the neat solution for the spells.

One thing is for sure; if I am going to retain the resource management game, it needs to be more exciting than staring at a number slowly ticking down from 12 to 0.

In 3E, dwindling resources had a profound impact on the game: once you used that Fireball or Meteor Swarm, it was gone. The difference wasn't just a number on the paper - it was a change that was physically present both in-game (your PC losing capabilities) and out of game (your playing piece using up its abilities).

I miss that.

Perhaps I should try adding some kind of penalty for being downed (reaching zero hp). This as a way to make encounters count for something; more than having your number tick down a step or two.

Yes, I have already done away with milestones and having to keep track of action points and daily item uses.

If I can prevent a character from using half a dozen surges in a single fight, and can dampen the impact of running out of surges, then there might be hope for 4E still!

As I see it, I share the design goals of 4E. I just want to reach them without having to sacrifice encounter excitement, and without reducing the "resource management game" to trivialities.

(More later... need to go)

I think there is a huge difference betwee the 4e and earlier editions resource management. I never played 3e, but in 1e/2e you had 2 things to manage, hit points, and spells.

Hit point management worked OK, but once people were low on them, that was the end of the day, just as surely as it is with surges now. Except that most PCs had a pretty limited number of hit points. Damage at high levels was a lot higher relatively, so really there was always that constant threat of near instant death, or at least quick reduction to near death.

It is hardly necessary to go into the flaws in the all-daily spell resource management. It just made spell casters either indomitable or pathetic and there was nothing in between. Non casting classes OTOH weren't even involved in that whole aspect of resources, which was rather disappointing. All they could ever have were relatively mundane at-will abilities as a consequence and that also was a disappointing aspect of older editions.

Seems to me that the current situation is about as good as it can get. All characters have SOME unmanaged at-will attack powers they can fall back on that at least gives them a couple different things they can do, plus the encounter ones for normal situations when they need a bit of oomph, and the dailies are still there to give you some costly extra firepower for when you get in a real jam or meet the boss.

All healing surges are intended to do is give PCs a way to endure several encounters without having 100's of hit points at a low level. On top of that they provide a hook for healing powers to operate, which is really a tactical concept that just adds more variety and regulates the rate of "healing".

The simplest way to change things IMHO would be to give 2-3 healing surges per short rest and that is all you have, just those few. It is really all 99% of characters need in a given fight anyhow. I've seen characters burn through 5-6 surges in a battle, but that's really about the limit of what you can trigger per-encounter anyway usually.

Basically surges stop being managed, though there would be some penalty for a character ending a battle at really low hit points. They might be forced to enter the next one with only 1 or 2 surges.

At least you have SOME resource management, and it is a small enough resource that managing it WITHIN an encounter can be fairly important. Outside encounters you're just going to have to rely on dailies as the resource challenge.

Or you can just ditch the whole resource management concept, make HS unlimited and dailies into encounter powers. It is a different game, but if it is more fun for your players then it is the right game for them.

Personally I tend to agree with people about encounter design. I still think weaker encounters should be in the mix. You say they have no 'beef', but to me they add tension, provide variety, drain resources, and serve story functions.