I don't get the dislike of healing surges

[Hussar]

My Clc/Sorc/MT/Geomancer in question was made because the players of the FS and the Druid left the group. I retired my Whip & pick dual-wielding Ftr/Rgr/Diviner/Spellsword at 10th level in favor of the new PC. He does the bulk of his healing via CompDiv's Sacred Healing feat, in which he burns a Turn Undead to give the equivalent of Fast Healing 3 for 5 rounds to all creatures within a 30' radius.

Not usable in combat, but before or afterwards, its pretty powerful. Burn 3 of my otherwise useless Turn Undeads and everyone in the party- and anyone we've saved- is back up 45HP. Done before combat, ongoing wounds auto-close, fallen comrades auto-stabilize.

And right there we have the solution that's been missing all this time. You don't have wands because you have a character that is a built in wand. Plus, you have a MT character, meaning your multiclass cleric isn't actually losing a whole lot of levels of casting at all.

See, this is my point. Sure, you didn't need healing wands or a lot of magical healing items because you chose feats (notably absent when that module was written) that allowed you to bypass the healing/day mechanics.

It would help, when talking about these sorts of things to say, "Hey, we didn't need to use healing wands because we used feats from a book published four years after the game came out that allows you to heal massive amounts of damage by burning turn attempts. "

Tends to sound a lot less impressive than "Hey, my group didn't need to use healing wands, why does everyone talk about using healing wands? You don't need them."

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I think part of your misunderstanding of our game was jumping to conclusions. You went from "we don't buy CLW wands and we have no crafters to make them" to thinking we had no healers. I never said that.

Like I said, we never bought CLW wands, but we DID have divine casters. But the facts are:

1) Except for about 2 months of play, the party played RttToEE from lvls 1-10 with only a Ftr/Clc and a Brb/Druid, both heavily weighted towards their warrior sides.

2) My healer was created after 10th level so that the campaign could continue because the other players playing divine casters moved away, and the Ftr/Clc retrained away his 2 Clc levels. As he stands, he's a 9th level divine caster in a Lvl 13 campaign. Had I not been playing 3.5Ed, he'd probably have been a straight Cleric or Druid.

Make of that what you will.

3) Except for a single wand found in treasure, we have had only one CLW wand. The only healing items we have had were potions. That, BTW, is not unusual from my perspective. My current group- together since 1997- rarely uses them and nobody plays crafter casters: we only have the ones we find in treasure. Before that, the only healing I saw in D&D was via potions or Clerics.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

53 pages already? Oi!

I had a suspicion that agreement was not in the offing, but 53 pages worth...?

The Auld Grump, no game at all last week, feeling... twitchy....

 

[pemerton]

53 pages already? Oi!

You need to do like I do and set your preferences to 20 posts a page. Then it's only 40 pages!

 

[Hussar]

I think part of your misunderstanding of our game was jumping to conclusions. You went from "we don't buy CLW wands and we have no crafters to make them" to thinking we had no healers. I never said that.

Like I said, we never bought CLW wands, but we DID have divine casters. But the facts are:

1) Except for about 2 months of play, the party played RttToEE from lvls 1-10 with only a Ftr/Clc and a Brb/Druid, both heavily weighted towards their warrior sides.

2) My healer was created after 10th level so that the campaign could continue because the other players playing divine casters moved away, and the Ftr/Clc retrained away his 2 Clc levels. As he stands, he's a 9th level divine caster in a Lvl 13 campaign. Had I not been playing 3.5Ed, he'd probably have been a straight Cleric or Druid.

Make of that what you will.

3) Except for a single wand found in treasure, we have had only one CLW wand. The only healing items we have had were potions. That, BTW, is not unusual from my perspective. My current group- together since 1997- rarely uses them and nobody plays crafter casters: we only have the ones we find in treasure. Before that, the only healing I saw in D&D was via potions or Clerics.

Well, again, the missing element was a specific feat which allowed you to essentially have unlimited (or a least a HELL of a lot of) healing.

It's not that you don't need healing wands. It's that you didn't need healing wands because of certain feat choices and builds.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

It's not that you don't need healing wands. It's that you didn't need healing wands because of certain feat choices and builds.

You're missing a very important point in what I said.

Yes, its true this particular PC can heal fairly nutty amounts of HP albeit in small chunks.

But also as I said, we generally didn't use healing wands even before that particular PC was created. Not in that multi-year campaign. Not in that 14 year old group. Not in my personal gaming experience going back 33+ years. IOW, our magical healing came from a bottle or a divine caster about 99.9% of the time.

And within the first 10 levels of progress in that RttToEE campaign, that generally meant getting it from potions and PCs that were poor healers at best.

This means, for instance, that when the party got mortally messed up by a combination of a DBF and some police robots in Expedition to the Barrier Peaks that claimed the life of THE cleric and others besides- all after the use of our potions from damage sustained in other encounters- that was it. There was no more healing to be had, and the party had to retreat, dragging their dead behind them.

Its a very different playstyle than when there are several other PCs who could say "I grab the wand, cast a few CLWs and we get back underway."

Our playstyle hasn't changed. CLWs are not a factor for us. The element that you're looking at- my Geomancer- is inordinately good at healing lots of damage in small chunks, but its also an anomalous PC that has been inserted into an established playstyle.

Had I REALLY wanted to be an ultra-healer, I'd have made the PC a pure Cleric, taken the Healing domain, and still taken Sacred Healing.

 

[Hussar]

DannyA - I'll totally agree that pre-3e, healing wands were never an issue. But, that's a separate thing. For one, PC's generally had a lot less HP's. For two, it was entirely possible in AD&D to go an entire combat without anyone taking any damage and, even if they did take damage, it was relatively minor - around 10% of their total HP, simply because the monsters did so little damage. Death was more often due to Save or Die than anything else.

See, now we're back to square one with 3e though. You've repeatedly claimed that your group, adventuring in RttTOEE could do 4-6 encounters between rest periods, without any core healer (only poor healers at best). Yet NO ONE ELSE CAN REPLICATE YOUR RESULTS. The game designers couldn't do it, the RPGA couldn't do it and most people reading this can't do it.

So how did you do it? If it wasn't because of using rules from splats, the only thing I'm left with is DM fudging. The numbers simply don't add up. A creature in 3e can do a character's full HP in a single round of combat. Granted, the odds aren't high, but, you're doing 4-6 encounters between rest periods and going into encounters at less than full HP. That only raises the odds.

How was your group not having a PC fatality every third encounter? By all rights, they should be. RttToEE is a meat grinder dungeon. The baddies are full on nasty. FFS, there's a bloody DRAGON in the first real encounter. Yet, you managed to breeze through this module, suffering virtually no losses, at a pace that no one else can replicate.

Do you not see how this doesn't add up?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

So how did you do it?

Hussar, my keyboard is blue in the face from the number of times I've told you. Rather than make you go look, I'll repeat it:

1) Spellcasters- NEVER "Nova". When the fight is in control, stop casting. This lets you have something in reserve if/when the unexpected occurs.

2) Don't fight unless you have to- evading a foe by subterfuge, stealth or spell is just as good as a slaying. Convincing a foe to surrender or let you pass works just as well as melee. You don't have to kill everyone, just certain key foes.

3) Do as much as you can to use the terrain to your advantage. If you have spells that can "manufacture" terrain or affect its type, use them: Wall spells don't just protect, they can be used to create choke points at which you have the advantage over your foes.

4) Play the odds: as has been pointed out numerous times, for the most part, martial PCs do not lose efficacy as their HP wane. We won a LOT of battles limping in with only 20% of our HP- which, to be fair, we had a lot of since most PCs had MCed into some kind of warrior class- and a few key spells.

Do you not see how this doesn't add up?

It is what it is: our experience in playing that module...which is the same experience we've been having in others campaigns- 3Ed and other- for more than a decade.

 

[Hussar]

4) Play the odds: as has been pointed out numerous times, for the most part, martial PCs do not lose efficacy as their HP wane. We won a LOT of battles limping in with only 20% of our HP- which, to be fair, we had a lot of since most PCs had MCed into some kind of warrior class- and a few key spells.

ARRRRGHGHGHGH!

Right there. Now, if a LOT of battles you were limping away with only 20% of your HP, how were you doing 4-6 encounters without having a core healer or healing wands?

See, that's the problem. You keep saying the same thing and the same thing just doesn't add up. You've got three claims here:

1. You could regularly do many encounters per rest period
2. You had no core healers and little or no healing items.
3. You had many encounters that left you with 20% of HP.

Do you not see what the problem here is? 1 and 3 are contradictory.

See, I too ran a meat grinder module (World's Largest Dungeon) without a core healer or healing items (or at least not many). But, the difference IME was that I was whacking a PC every 3 sessions on average. And most of those were through HP death. There were maybe 8-10 save or die effects, but easily 2/3rds of the PC fatalities were due to HP loss.

This is why I really question what you're saying. Because it just doesn't make sense.

Hang on... Do you count avoiding an encounter as an encounter? When you say multiple encounters between rest periods, how many actual combat encounters do you mean?

 

[billd91]

ARRRRGHGHGHGH!

Right there. Now, if a LOT of battles you were limping away with only 20% of your HP, how were you doing 4-6 encounters without having a core healer or healing wands?

See, that's the problem. You keep saying the same thing and the same thing just doesn't add up. You've got three claims here:

1. You could regularly do many encounters per rest period
2. You had no core healers and little or no healing items.
3. You had many encounters that left you with 20% of HP.

Do you not see what the problem here is? 1 and 3 are contradictory.

See, I too ran a meat grinder module (World's Largest Dungeon) without a core healer or healing items (or at least not many). But, the difference IME was that I was whacking a PC every 3 sessions on average. And most of those were through HP death. There were maybe 8-10 save or die effects, but easily 2/3rds of the PC fatalities were due to HP loss.

This is why I really question what you're saying. Because it just doesn't make sense.

Hang on... Do you count avoiding an encounter as an encounter? When you say multiple encounters between rest periods, how many actual combat encounters do you mean?

I guess he's been playing it wrong? Is that what you're saying? Your experiences are so much more right than his that you can't conceive of the way he group plays?

And yes, avoiding an encounter or resolving it without fighting is still an encounter. Worth XPs too.