At Will abilities - no healing among the list, should there be?

[Ahnehnois]

One of the many things that fixing the hit point system fixes.

If damage is separated into different categories based on what it means, at-will healing for some of the minor ones is entirely reasonable and not unbalanced. However, as long as hit points remain as they are, at-will healing is not a good idea.

 

[Hussar]

Meh, I have no real problem with resetting hp after encounters. But, if you do that, make sure you remove in-combat healing. HP's become a resource during an encounter at that point.

But, honestly, there's about zero chance of this actually making it into the rules.

 

[keterys]

Available only to the cleric? Check (so far).

It's a theme - the wizard, rogue, or fighter could be your herbalist too.

And at 3rd level you can almost go "And after every rest we spend 3.125gp per hp healed to bring us to full from now until the end of the campaign"

 

[Dausuul]

I guess I don't see the harm in bringing everyone back to full at the end of an encounter.

Kill em during the fight, or try again next time. It works in a -LOT- of competing RPGS just fine, and in MMOs.

[size=+2]D&D IS NOT A COMPUTER GAME.[/size]

Sorry. I seem to be seeing the "It works in CRPGs/MMOs!" thing a lot recently.

In an MMO, there is basically one thing you do while adventuring: You kill stuff. There is no social interaction (except between players) and very little exploration. So you do whatever you gotta do to get the PCs back in the fight as fast as possible. Anything that goes on out of combat is a distraction. Attrition over time is a bad thing; you want to keep the game at maximum intensity.

In a tabletop game, however, there is a lot of stuff that happens outside combat. There are NPCs to talk to, and there are unknown settings to explore. There is an open-ended world where PCs can try anything they can think of and the results of their actions stick. Furthermore, when combat does occur, calculations that an MMO server can perform in the blink of an eye require physical dice, paper and pencil, and slow human brains to process.

What all this adds up to is a game that is necessarily much slower-paced than any MMO, and one where in-game continuity plays a much bigger role. In an MMO, the boss you kill today will come back in a few minutes to be killed again. In D&D, that boss is dead for good (or until some necromancer turns it into an undead horror). Maintaining that sense of continuity, of actions having lasting consequences, is vital to what makes a tabletop game fun. And part of that is that if you get torn up in a fight, you don't pop back up at full strength ready for the next one. You are hurt and have to deal with that. Maybe you avoid a fight you would otherwise have charged into. Maybe you try to talk some of the bad guys into a short-term alliance. These are options you don't have in an MMO.

Bottom line, if you want the MMO experience, why are you playing D&D? It's a terrible substitute. The servers are agonizingly slow and error-prone, the graphics are crap, and you can't even log on most of the time--you have to wait until the "Your Local DM" server is available, which happens only a few hours each week. D&D is never going to work as an MMO and should not try. Instead it should play to its own strengths.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, TEN THOUSAND TIMES NO.

+No.

 

[NewJeffCT]

While I would prefer not to have at-will healing, I think it could be okay if done properly. There are other pen & paper RPGs that have clerics/priests/healers that have at-will healing and it seems to have worked for them. (It's been ages since I've played any RPG outside of D&D, so I don't remember the names... just remember the GM getting upset that I insisted on my cleric/priest/healer healing everybody up to full after each encounter.)

I don't like automatically healing up to full after a long rest, but even when I played 1E back in the day, we just hand-waved healing over the days needed at low levels ("And, 3 days later, you set out back out again...") and at higher levels, the cleric would have enough healing to get everybody up to full in one to two days at the most. It's just up to the DM to plan around time dependent adventures a bit differently between editions.

So, I'm against at-will healing overall, but not that strongly. There should be a limit/price if healing is at-will.

 

[Obryn]

There was a reserve feat that gave at-will healing under almost all conditions in Complete Champion.

It only healed to half max - "bloodied" before it was called "bloodied." Same with the Dragon Priest or whatever he was called in the 3.5 PHB2.

-O

 

[IronWolf]

While I would prefer not to have at-will healing, I think it could be okay if done properly. There are other pen & paper RPGs that have clerics/priests/healers that have at-will healing and it seems to have worked for them. (It's been ages since I've played any RPG outside of D&D, so I don't remember the names... just remember the GM getting upset that I insisted on my cleric/priest/healer healing everybody up to full after each encounter.)

I find it interesting how you say it can work if done properly but then immediately describe a situation that it was causing a problem in the game, albeit for the GM, but I still count that as a problem.

 

[BobTheNob]

Years of playing MMOs have kind of re-tuned my expectations for playing a healer - and I've come to expect an active playstyle where I try to heal through the incoming damage of the group.

Thats funny. MMO's had the exact opposite effect on me. They forever convinced me that healers SHOULDNT have that much ooomph and that healing should be a secondary role.

Not going to get into an argument about it. If you want to know my motivations, go to the GuildWars2 website and see their arguments for removing the healer role. Sums up very succinctly why I would argue against the dedicated healer. (Paticularly the "Whack-a-mole" reference)

 

[NewJeffCT]

I find it interesting how you say it can work if done properly but then immediately describe a situation that it was causing a problem in the game, albeit for the GM, but I still count that as a problem.

I think that was a problem with the DM's mentality fixed on D&D and Vancian magic, not the actual system, though.

I didn't like the system, if I recall, but figured that since my healer PC was able to heal everybody to full without burning out his magic/mana/spell points or whatever, I should do it whenever possible. As I tell my players all the time, you never know when that extra 1, 2 or 3 hit points is going to make the difference between dropping or staying on your feet.