The Healing Paradox

[Herschel]

To get rid of the cleric being forced into taking nothing but healing, we house ruled a few changes for clerics.

First, a cleric can take no more then 1/2 his given level slots (rounded down) as healing. So if he can have six 1st level spells, only three can be healing.

Second, we doubled the amount of healing each spell did, so, a Cure Light wounds heals for 2d8 instead of 1d8.

These two rules made a big difference for us, and allowed the cleric to take other spells he found more useful and interesting.

That's....really weird. The solution to needing more healing is to limit it? I always houseruled Clerics could take whichever spells they wanted and could "convert"/"expend" them as same-level healing spells as needed.

 

[Fanaelialae]

As you said yourself, the problem is the DM, not the rules. So the DM has to fix it.

That's not an acceptable solution, IMO, because not every campaign is structured in the same way.

For example, I'm currently playing in a survival horror style game. There are no overarching goals or deadlines; we're basically exploring and trying to survive long enough to figure out what the heck's going on (the closest comparison for this game is Silent Hill). While our enemies are numerous, deadly, and extremely belligerent, they aren't geniuses who can predict our every move.

There are certainly times when we can't rest (camping out in the middle of the street would be suicide) but as it's a sandbox game, we often rest when we locate a position that is relatively secure (easily barricaded or well hidden). Our DM isn't going to contrive a magical reason to stop us from resting if we do so sooner than he might like. Nor, IMO, should he. If he did, resting would become a game of "guess what the DM is thinking". That's not the game I come to play.

The rules should be geared so that DMs aren't forced to come up with contrivances and work-arounds for why and how PCs should be denied rest. The existence of such rules doesn't preclude the DM from being able to use wandering monsters or repopulating dungeons (or any of the other old tricks), but proper rules would remove the need to do so even when inappropriate.

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

I am with Tony Vargas on this one.

"Shake it off, and get in there, and FIGHT!!!" is a ubiquitous healing mechanic in heroic genres.

What some like to denigrate as "gamist" is what every action movie fan and every heroic comic book fan habitually thinks of as "awesome" and "dramatic".

It is the old-style D&D healing which is clumsy and suspension-of-disbelief crushing by common standards.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Don't have the patience to enter into a "what's wrong with healing surges" debate with you, especially when it's a well beaten dead horse.

Well, and because there's really nothing wrong with them.

Actually, there is something wrong with healing surges, and Vancian casting, and AEDU. Daily resources. Daily resources dictate pacing, which limits the kinds of campaigns the DM can run, presents players with metagame incentives, and restricts the kinds of 'stories' you can collectively tell (if you're into RPGs as collective storytelling).

Aside from that, though, there's nothing wrong with surge mechanics that wouldn't require fixing a lot of other stuff, too. Getting rid of surges could be advisable as part of a design shift to encounter-balancing or adventure-based resources management.

5e doesn't show any inclination in that direction, so should probably at least keep HD, if not bring them closer in function to surges. In particular, keeping party healing resources separate from the Cleric's spell resources.

Google disassociated mechanics, then rethink your idea that the backlash against 4E was based on being sticklers for tradition, rather than people seeing blatantly gamist mechanics and saying "yuck".

A cleric using Vancian mechanics to cast Cure "Light" Wounds on his mortally-wounded (1 hp away from actual death, say), companion, over and over again until he's perfectly fine (possibly going and 'resting' another whole day to memorize some more of them because he rolled a couple '1's on his d8s) /isn't/ gamist and verisimilitude-busting?

The only thing that makes the old Clerical healing seem tolerable is familiarity. At least, it's the only rationale I feel comfortable attributing to someone I'm having a polite discussion with.

As far as 3E clerics go, cure spells were still underpowered. The importance of CLW wands is a reflection of that, not a cause - cleric wasn't enough, party started making or buying wands as well. Codzilla is irrelevant - a result of the game bribing people with combat ability to play the cleric, which was a flawed approach.

It's the approach you just advocated. And, just upping clerical healing spells isn't going to fix it. The problem is having healing traded off for other spells of the cleric. Healing is a whole-party resource, making one character bear that whole burden is imbalancing. If you make healing so potent that the cleric needs few spells to fully heal his party, then when he does devote his spells to healing their staying power goes over the top. If you make healing require much of the cleric's spells, but give him other abilities to compensate, then when there are other sources of healing (like a second or third cleric, or those WoCLW), and spells can be devoted to non-healing applications, the cleric becomes over powered. It's just not a workable paradigm.

Healing Surges are. Hit Dice, if they acted as an ultimate healing limit, like healing surges did, could be, just at a level that'd make for shorter adventuring 'days' due to lack of healing.

Again - 3E offered a flat healing amount per spell. Affected one person, didn't scale with level (with the exception of Heal).

The various Cure...Wounds spells did add your level, and did have 'Mass' versions.

So, yeah, it's all been tried. Nothing worked. Healing surges did. Maybe they worked a little too well or seemed aesthetically unpleasing to some people, but they were a functional mechanic.

 

[Authweight]

I agree Tony, healing surges were a pretty excellent mechanic. They made healers useful without letting healers seriously affect the length of the adventuring day, which is a remarkable feat really. Healing is still really good, because it keeps you up and fighting in a combat, but the total amount you can heal in a day is fundamentally capped, and is fully accessible to everyone over the course of an adventuring day regardless of whether or not they have a dedicated healer.

Now, some people may find them overly gamey or unrealistic. But I think every reasonable person will agree that the healing surge mechanic did exactly what it was designed to do in an elegant, easy to understand way.

 

[Derren]

For example, I'm currently playing in a survival horror style game.

And in a survival horror game you do not track supplies like water and food which limits the time the PCs can loiter around and instead force them to go out into the scary world to explore?

 

[jadrax]

"Push on or rest up?" - That's the question every party and player will be facing and what I believe is the crux of the problem. The main issue is that there's no compelling gameplay reason to push on. There's often *story* reasons, but I believe there should be gameplay reasons as well.

I think its more than that tbh, its not just that their are not mechanical reasons for pushing on, it is that they are severe mechanical reasons not to.

Even if you are pressed for time, and have the rescue the princess in the next 5 hours... pushing on with no spells and 17 hit points between you is pretty much a stupid decision to make because you will almost certainly both fail to rescue the princess and also die in the process.

 

[Fanaelialae]

And in a survival horror game you do not track supplies like water and food which limits the time the PCs can loiter around and instead force them to go out into the scary world to explore?

Sure we do, but because having a cleric would go against the style of the game (turn undead would be flat out broken), the DM instead increased the healing rate. We're not always 100% full after a night's rest, but it generally heals us to at least 90%. Sure, we probably wouldn't want to hole up for a week due to the need for supplies, but the rules of this campaign make it such that doing so would be completely pointless anyway.

 

[Aenghus]

There are strong opinions on this topic.

In the recent Reddit Q&A session AMA: Mike Mearls, head of D&D Research and Design at WotC : rpg said there were loud voices calling for a less effective extended rest.

The feedback on long rests has primarily been that they are far too forgiving. It feels lame that the party can be on the edge of death, sleep for eight hours, and bounce back up to full strength.

He also said that

5.Healing is definitely going to get a number of dials to let DMs tweak it to fit their games. You can imagine a range that starts with "Festering wounds and missing limbs" on one end and has "Sleep cures all ills" on the other.

Because I definitely see hp damage as mostly cuts and scratches, and want an extended rest to heal all hp. It's not going away as an option.


In my experience, players whose PCs are low in hp (or other resources such as spells, but hp in particular) get very cagey and will prefer resting up or retreating to pressing on, and not continue with the adventure till they are mostly healed up. It's starting to look like the default healing model will involve a healbot or other magic or lots of rest and downtime. (Im personally excluding the "force PCs to press on while weak" option as I don't advocate suicidal PC tactics).

The issue with the "default" style of play is making it acessible to the largest group of people's tastes possible. The designers need to avoid the healbot problem somehow, while keeping PC fatality rates ,especially at low level , under control. I think they need to avoid lots of rest time as well - I find new players get very impatient with PCs confined to bedrest for multiple days, and don't see the need to enforce such rules, myself.

 

[Uller]

There are strong opinions on this topic.

In the recent Reddit Q&A session AMA: Mike Mearls, head of D&D Research and Design at WotC : rpg said there were loud voices calling for a less effective extended rest.

It sounds like WotC has it under control. Everyone who wants longer healing times can have it. Everyone one who wants shorter times can have it. You just have to get your group to agree to a rate that makes sense for the type of game you are playing.

For me: 90% of the time the party hits some good breaking point in the adventure, they return to some sanctuary to rest and refit for time X (it doesn't matter how long...a day...two days, maybe 3), the NPCs and monsters make moves to react to the results of what the PCs have done and the adventure resumes. Healing times matter naught. If the PCs take longer than a week or so, the adventure is effectively over. The villains will surely have either moved on, set up much tougher defenses or maybe even gone on the offensive.

Occasionally some finer granularity for heal time (and time to regain spells and what not) matters. Maybe they decided to rest in some place not so safe or maybe they only want to rest for half a day or whatever because of time pressure built into the adventure...but that's almost always an outlier in every game I've ever played or DMed. So...I don't really care what WotC does on this.

I think they SHOULD keep the heal times generally short to keep the game accessible to the most people.