D&D 5E breaking the healing rules with goodberries

[Zardnaar]

I don't think it has become an issue because most people have not seen the combo at the table. I knew about the combo almost a year ago and even included it on my Bard guide.

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?363601-Bardic-Lore-A-Basic-College-of-Lore-Bard-Guide

That is a bit of theory crafting. We do actually have a level 1 life cleric/Druid 5 in our current group. The combo is legit and very powerful. It is kinda broken and it is a better deal than using prayer of healing which we usually don't bother using along with beacon of hope as they are inefficient by comparison at least as far as out of combat healing works.

The Life celric 1/Bard or Druid XYZ is the best healing combo in the game although the healer feat is also very very good. We have a Rogue:Thief who runs around with a healing kit using it as a bonus action. The Cleric1/Land Druid XYZ combo is also very good as the Druid can recall lots of low level spells after a short rest.

Out of combat each 1st level slot more or less heals 40 hit points and you can use 4 spells per day without having to start using your higher level slots. The Land Druid can get around 8 of them if needed. Odds are you will use a faerire fire or whatever in there as well. So just using level 1 spell slots you can heal around 320 hit points of damage.

The Lore Bard can do something similar using the same combo with the life cleric splash and at level 6 can steal good berry and aura of vitality for uber healing.

So yes it is broken IMHO and that is from in game experience. The reason I allow it is because no one wants to be the healer and this way the Druid gets to use her spells for other things. Using the same logic I often take the healer feat as a non life cleric as I want to be fireballing the enemies as a light ceric for example. That and some of the players are a bit random and seem to enjoy hurting themselves.

Its not the most broken thing in the game such as farming bless+advantage with sharpshooter and great weapon master for uber damage or perhaps twinking out concentration saves or the Sorlock MC combo. It is a contributing factor towards breaking the game as the whole 6-8 encounters with 2 short rests per day thing doesn't always work in practice, leads to the game being a grind and the encounter rules are very much on the easy side of things. I think we went 400% over a deadly encounter and won it.

It can get a bit nutty with the healer feat and warcaster/resilient con though as its easy to get around the whole attrition based expectations of the game design.

 

[Celtavian]

Right, whereas in my approach, you (the DM) don't have to plan differently at all--it's all on the players to approach the encounter differently, and the giants will kill them without hesitation if they approach it both aggressively and stupidly. (There's where karma helps--that "without hesitation" doesn't have to destroy months of investment in a PC even when it's an unambiguous "you lose, you're dead.") Leveraging the damage gap into an encounter win is the players' job, not the DM's job. This might involve illusions, surprise, taunting, or just simple geometry.

Clearly we have different approaches, and you like to put more of a burden on the DM to make the encounter easier for the PCs. And that is okay--you can play your magic elf game in whatever way makes you happy. (I do find it a little surprising that you see it as your job to protect your veteran players from tough tactical situations, whereas I'm throwing tough tactical problems at my newbish players and watching them struggle then thrive--from the way you describe your group I'd expect it to be the other way around, with you throwing tough opponents at your group that strain their creativity and/or force a tactical retreat. But YMMV I guess. I hypothesize that this difference has a lot to do with our different play agendas, where you want to play out heroes saving the world and I want to play out a world for PCs to interact with in interesting ways.)

Easier for the PCs? You are sorely mistaken. Not killing them and easy are two completely different things. Why you do not understand the difference I don't understand. I've explained it clearly. I have to tone down encounters or I kill the PCs. I do not want to kill the PCs. I can kill them at any point in time. The trick is challenging them without killing them. Maybe you don't care if campaigns end, but my players have zero desire to play in campaigns where they are endlessly dying and creating new characters. They would quit playing rather than tolerate that. I don't blame them at all. The fun for a player is building a character. Dying over and over again is not fun.

You really have a sort self-delusion going that I don't understand. You always have to plan differently. You created an artificial role-play scenario making 24 beholders act in a disorganized fashion so your players could survive. If 24 beholders acted in concert, they could wipe out a party quickly and easily by virtue of the number of attacks going in the direction of the party. You created a scenario where that many beholders were together. You created a reason why they didn't act in concert. You created an environment where they couldn't work together to bring to bear their full force against the party. You crafted a scenario that a PC party could survive using 24 beholders that in no way is standard for the game. This odd pretense you have that you don't have to craft encounters a party can survive is nothing but a pretense.

Why would it be the other way around when I have an unlimited ability to increase the difficulty and kill them at any point in time? I'd probably kill your newbie players easily because they wouldn't fully comprehend the tactics I was using against them until they were dead. I would have thought the reason would be self-evident as to why I'm worried about not killing my veteran players. That reason being I have to increase the difficulty to such a level that it would annihilate a less competent party.

Your newbies wander into one of my encounters where I'm running the 24 beholders. They aren't staying in the ship. They are acting in an organized manner seeking slaves to repair the ship. A new leader has ascended because the beholders have been trained to follow a hierarchy of leadership in the absence of the hive mother. Their first course of action is to secure the area where the ship crashed and scout reporting back to the new leader the layout of the land and any possible threats. The ship is equipped with an abundance of creatures in stasis for the beholders to use as tools for scouting, repairing the ship, for food, and recovering supplies due to the slow movement of beholders and their lack of motivation to engage in mundane tasks themselves. There are a few beholder casters on the ship specifically there to dispel things like darkness and invisibility. The beholders have an entire plan for dealing with a crashed ship devised by the high intellect hive mother who made sure to instill in the beholder group a hierarchy of leadership including a precise order of who is followed next in the event of death. Anyone that sees one of these beholder ships generally avoids them because such ships have been known to land on planets and conquer entire regions before forces can be joined together to defeat the beholder army and their hive mother. That right there is an example of our differing viewpoints on how creatures should be played. And let us not forget the surprise on their face when they find out I threw out the random eye ray rule and beholders can choose their rays. You know I'm not following that rule ever.

Not to mention you throw out a ton of counter-scenarios to defeat one class without ever going, "Hmm. Where is the rest of the party? What are they doing?" I never do this. Party's work together to win. I've played with parties that work as individuals within the group, I often end up killing them far too easily because the monsters are working in a coordinated fashion. The toughest encounters are coordinated encounters where the PCs are dealing with a multitude of methods to counter the group's tactics, not one individual's tactics. For example, your three stone giants come out to attack the paladin. The bard hits them with hypnotic pattern freezing two of them. The third still active guy becomes the focus for the arrows of the hunter ranger, warlock, and sorcerer/rogue. They chew through his hit points while he tries to grapple the paladin and throw him over the edge. Rinse and repeat for the other two stone giants. Then what? You add a shaman with counterspell? A few dire orc servants to wake the giants from the hypnotic pattern? Do you spend time thinking about how the other party members will counter the tactics you're using to stop the paladin? You seem to view it as an isolated fight, when it isn't.

The only difference in our approaches is that you do things I would never do because the players would die. I don't waste time trying to figure out how giffs handle beholders. I make beholders one of the most fearsome things in the galaxy prior to starting the encounter. Giffs run from them if they can. They only fight if they outnumber the beholders substantially. Beholders have been around long enough that they have a means to counter darkness rather than me going, "Damn. I didn't think of that beforehand." If I'm creating a beholder fight, I think of all the ways the party might counter them that the beholder would likely know, and I give the beholder the means to counter the tactic. I spend a great deal of time designing things prior because I can't stand playing beholders stupid if for some reason they have been brought together as a group. I really doubt they would be a stupid, disorganized group even with this hive mother thing you incorporated given their intelligence.

You wing it a lot more than I do near as I can tell. I play a lot more aggressively than you do because my monsters don't sit waiting for the players to figure out what they're going to do. For example, my beholders would not wait in the ship and my vampire archers wouldn't sit by why the party was figuring out what to do about them. Come prepared to assault them and win now or be prepared to be assaulted or be prepared to run.

There is nothing easy about my games. So latching onto this idea of me creating easier encounters is pretty ridiculous. That is a misinterpretation on your part. There is a very big difference between not killing a party and making things easy. I have to ensure I don't kill the party by playing too aggressively. From what you've told me of your scenarios, that does not appear to be the case in your games.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Easier for the PCs? You are sorely mistaken. Not killing them and easy are two completely different things. Why you do not understand the difference I don't understand. I've explained it clearly. I have to tone down encounters or I kill the PCs. I do not want to kill the PCs. I can kill them at any point in time. The trick is challenging them without killing them. Maybe you don't care if campaigns end, but my players have zero desire to play in campaigns where they are endlessly dying and creating new characters. They would quit playing rather than tolerate that. I don't blame them at all. The fun for a player is building a character. Dying over and over again is not fun.

Sounds like Hemlock is old-school and you're not. No judgement implied, that's just the world-view disconnect I see causing you to talk past eachother. There's a time-honored style of D&D in which PC do die like flies, the DM creates dungeons not challenges, and everyone's fine with it.

I can't say I care for it much anymore, but it's a real thing.

Why would it be the other way around when I have an unlimited ability to increase the difficulty and kill them at any point in time?

If you design encounters status-quo, then you're just not taking the PC's abilities into account: not soft-balling, not tailoring to be an exciting/fun challenge, not dialing it up just to kill them. The PCs don't matter.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Easier for the PCs? You are sorely mistaken. Not killing them and easy are two completely different things. Why you do not understand the difference I don't understand. I've explained it clearly. I have to tone down encounters or I kill the PCs. *snip* Not to mention you throw out a ton of counter-scenarios to defeat one class without ever going, "Hmm. Where is the rest of the party? What are they doing?" I never do this. Party's work together to win. I've played with parties that work as individuals within the group, I often end up killing them far too easily because the monsters are working in a coordinated fashion. The toughest encounters are coordinated encounters where the PCs are dealing with a multitude of methods to counter the group's tactics, not one individual's tactics. For example, your three stone giants come out to attack the paladin. The bard hits them with hypnotic pattern freezing two of them. The third still active guy becomes the focus for the arrows of the hunter ranger, warlock, and sorcerer/rogue. They chew through his hit points while he tries to grapple the paladin and throw him over the edge. Rinse and repeat for the other two stone giants.

Precisely[1]. And I have no idea why you feel the need to protect your party from that fight. You say they're "not ready" for stone giants yet, but my experience is that even non-min-maxers like my players can handle fights like that just fine by level 7 or so, in a number of ways including stealth, spells like Hypnotic Pattern, conjurations, stunning monks, Repelling Blast warlocks, invisibility, diplomacy, etc., etc. The encounter may be set up to bypass AC but that doesn't mean that the PCs have to lose--it's just set up to challenge different strengths. Or to punish them of course if they insist on doing the same old, same old.

And then you turn around and accuse me of not understanding party synergies. [shake my head] Obviously not.

[1] And if I wanted to counter hypnotic pattern, I'd disperse the Stone Giants so they're not all within 30' of each other, and they'd rely more on rocks than on clubs. And they could play hide and seek behind bounders and in caves, so they have total cover from spells except while attacking. Etc., etc. You can tweak the difficulty based on how hard you want the fight to be. With their crazy-high Athletics it might be fun to make verticality a big aspect of the encounter. And of course you need a good reason for the Stone Giants to be together, and goals for them which might bring them into conflict with the PCs' goals. Even if that goal is just "these PCs are known murderhobos who will attack anything with shiny, and these stone giants are wearing golden necklaces that they don't want to give up."

The only difference in our approaches is that you do things I would never do because the players would die.

Heh.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Sounds like Hemlock is old-school and you're not. No judgement implied, that's just the world-view disconnect I see causing you to talk past eachother. There's a time-honored style of D&D in which PC do die like flies, the DM creates dungeons not challenges, and everyone's fine with it.

I can't say I care for it much anymore, but it's a real thing.

That's a fair characterization.

I think if I wanted "challenges" I'd probably want to do it as an actual adversarial game where the DM is separate from both sides, and both sides are operating under similar resource constraints and a similar metagame. Sort of D&D-as-Kriegspiel, or Head-of-Vecna. That might be fun. But adversarial play in the middle of the RPG is not my thing.

 

[Mistwell]

1.) You wouldn't want to combine with Beacon of Hope, because it's more effective to just cast Prayer of Healing twice.

2.) The durations are incompatible anyway. Beacon of Hope lasts one minute, but it takes ten minutes to cast Prayer of Healing.

3.) Any spell with a casting time longer than 1 action requires your concentration throughout the entire casting time. Prayer of Healing does require your concentration for that reason. See PHB 202, Longer Casting Time.

Yes I know. See conversation about me no noticing casting time, above.

 

[Celtavian]

Precisely[1]. And I have no idea why you feel the need to protect your party from that fight. You say they're "not ready" for stone giants yet, but my experience is that even non-min-maxers like my players can handle fights like that just fine by level 7 or so, in a number of ways including stealth, spells like Hypnotic Pattern, conjurations, stunning monks, Repelling Blast warlocks, invisibility, diplomacy, etc., etc. The encounter may be set up to bypass AC but that doesn't mean that the PCs have to lose--it's just set up to challenge different strengths. Or to punish them of course if they insist on doing the same old, same old.

And then you turn around and accuse me of not understanding party synergies. [shake my head] Obviously not.

I do not accuse you. I see it in the tactics you list. They would not work. The fact that you have an encounter with 24 beholders that a party can succeed against shows me you don't understand monster synergies very well either.

You continuously show a lack of understanding of the concept I'm talking about. The goal of a DM is to challenge a party without killing them and this is how you interpret that, "And I have no idea why you feel the need to protect your party from that fight." When a person keeps making a statement that shows a lack of comprehension of the topic being discussed, what else can you do to explain it?

I've killed multiple parties in the past making encounters too strong. I would decimate your party because these encounter I made too strong did not sit idly by and let the players "figure it out." I went after them. They had a few rounds to survive before they were dead. When I make an active enemy, I go after the party. There is no diplomacy. There is no hiding. There is no time to "figure it out." The enemy is coming to kill them. The enemy is using coordinated tactics as strong and effective as the party uses. If they fall, the enemy is going to kill them. None of this, "Vampires are hiding with bows in a place where they must be dragged into the sun." My players would annihilate that encounter. Three stone giants on a cliff ledge. Party would kill that encounter.

You don't understand what I'm talking about pure and simple. Why would I have to try not to kill a party of 30 plus year adventurers that seen it all? You answer that as, "You're protecting you're party." When I know it is because I am also an extremely proficient DM and can design encounters to kill them.

[1] And if I wanted to counter hypnotic pattern, I'd disperse the Stone Giants so they're not all within 30' of each other, and they'd rely more on rocks than on clubs. And they could play hide and seek behind bounders and in caves, so they have total cover from spells except while attacking. Etc., etc. You can tweak the difficulty based on how hard you want the fight to be. With their crazy-high Athletics it might be fun to make verticality a big aspect of the encounter. And of course you need a good reason for the Stone Giants to be together, and goals for them which might bring them into conflict with the PCs' goals. Even if that goal is just "these PCs are known murderhobos who will attack anything with shiny, and these stone giants are wearing golden necklaces that they don't want to give up."

How would you counter the archers hammering with the bard using hypnotic pattern at a key time to counter the stone throwing hill giants once they set up with the flying paladin all working together? If you understood party synergies as you claim, then you would understand all of this being brought to bear at once. Not some piecemeal crap like you just tried to pull here.

I'll spread the stone giants out. Then the paladin? Did you forget about the paladin? But I'll have them grapple the paladin as a group and throw him off the ledge. What about he hypnotic pattern? I'll have them climbing cliffs. Flying paladin and archers? Hypnotic pattern on flier?

Once again, I don't see an understanding of party synergies by you. I wonder how effective your party is at fighting in a coordinated manner. I just see random tactics tossed out to deal with individual characters, not coordinated parties using the tactics I'm listing at key times in a fight to gain an advantage.

On a side note, when I said the party wasn't ready for groups of Stone Giants they were 5th level. By 7th level they'll be ready for stone giants. They're probably ready right now. They recently killed two Hill Giants, 10 orogs, and four dire wolves taking only 20 hit points of damage amongst the group. They fought a hydra that did next to nothing to them even though I gave it 300 hit points. Far too easy to use fire to disrupt regeneration. They killed two treants with four animated trees with only a handful of spells wasted and very little damage taken.

This is just a very easy game. I knew Pathfinder/3E well enough to push to them to the wall of death, but not over. I'm not just as proficient with this system yet to do the same. I don't mind admitting that.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I do not accuse you. I see it in the tactics you list. They would not work. The fact that you have an encounter with 24 beholders that a party can succeed against shows me you don't understand monster synergies very well either.

Sigh. They're not supposed to "work" against the full party, remember? Killing the PCs is not the goal. Providing a threat that the PCs must honor is the goal. In particular, that is a threat that the paladin must honor, probably by just staying out of the way while the ranged guys kill it.

The beholders aren't "an encounter". You have failed to understand that scenario.

How would you counter the archers hammering with the bard using hypnotic pattern at a key time to counter the stone throwing hill giants once they set up with the flying paladin all working together? If you understood party synergies as you claim, then you would understand all of this being brought to bear at once. Not some piecemeal crap like you just tried to pull here.

I'll spread the stone giants out. Then the paladin? Did you forget about the paladin? But I'll have them grapple the paladin as a group and throw him off the ledge. What about he hypnotic pattern? I'll have them climbing cliffs. Flying paladin and archers? Hypnotic pattern on flier?

"Archers"? So you've got a bard, a paladin, and two archers? Or is this party bigger than I had assumed? Assuming four 7th level PCs against three stone giants, if I'm playing the stone giants at maximal effectiveness and you're playing the four PCs, I counter the archer by using total cover (thus restricting the archer to one Readied attack per round) and counterbattery fire. My counterbattery fire is better than yours due to higher damage and probably higher to-hit, plus more HP. If the paladin gets close, kick him over the edge of the cliff, no grappling needed unless you want to. And I have better mobility than AoOs than the paladin too, so even a single stone giant can mess him up pretty bad while the other PCs are distracted, perhaps kill him depending on his build. Do you want to game this out? Start a thread and post your party and let's game this out adversarially. Three stone giants against four 7th level PCs. Or you can play the stone giants and I'll design and play the PCs. It doesn't matter to me. The PCs ought to win because they have more tools, but the stone giants can make it interesting if you play them like synchronized battlecomputers instead of stone giants. I wouldn't do that against players but I'll gladly do it against you.

 

[Celtavian]

Sounds like Hemlock is old-school and you're not. No judgement implied, that's just the world-view disconnect I see causing you to talk past eachother. There's a time-honored style of D&D in which PC do die like flies, the DM creates dungeons not challenges, and everyone's fine with it.

I can't say I care for it much anymore, but it's a real thing.

I'm past that state of DMing. I have zero interest in killing players continuously at this point. I could do it at will as a DM. There is nothing a player can do to survive a DM intent on killing them. The cards are stacked in a DM's favor. It's not a matter of "Old School" thinking. It's maturing. The game was not built to kill players. It was built to challenge them, while allowing them to develop characters over multiple levels.

If you design encounters status-quo, then you're just not taking the PC's abilities into account: not soft-balling, not tailoring to be an exciting/fun challenge, not dialing it up just to kill them. The PCs don't matter.

There is no soft-balling going on. Once again, already done status-quo DMing. It does not work for my group. If I just toss out some guys I dreamed up without taking into account the party's capabilities, the party will wipe them out.

The disconnect is happening because Hemlock has interpreted "challenging the party without killing them" as "not trying to kill them." This is not correct. The idea behind challenging a party without killing them has to do with encounter creation and has nothing to do with intent. The enemies are always trying to kill the PCs unless they have some alternative goal like imprisonment or slavery. What I try do is design the encounter where they can achieve victory. Why would I have to do that? Because I have designed many encounters that killed the PCs.

I'm pretty sure you've been doing this long enough to have had similar experiences where you are designing an encounter. You think the encounter is damn cool. You think the party can handle it. Then you run the encounter, they end up getting pasted. Then you have this group of pissed off players that feel you screwed them, especially if you designed the encounter in such a fashion they had zero chance of winning. You didn't realize this would happen until you killed the party. I learned this lesson having done it to parties more than a few times. So I've found when learning new system as I'm doing in 5E, it is better to error on the side of caution so I don't put players in no-win situations. That is not fun for anyone. I'd bet it wouldn't be fun for Hemlock's players either.

I don't get how Hemlock doesn't get what I'm talking about. To me this is easy to understand. If some of the more experienced DMs told me the same concept, I'd understand immediately what they were talking about. I wouldn't refer to it as soft-ballling or "trying to protect the party." I'd say, "Oh experienced DM. He has probably killed the party a ton and dealt with the unhappy after effects." Have you not done the same thing over the years DMing? Accidentally killed the party with an encounter you made far too strong? You must have done this more than a few times because either the monsters were too strong or the tactical choice you made was something the PCs didn't have the means to counter magically or tactically. I can't imagine a guy that's been playing as long as you have hasn't done this many times, especially when learning a new system.

That's the idea behind my thinking. Not "soft-balling" or this other trash. I have to self-police as a DM to avoid killing because when I do design encounters to challenge the PCs, I employ some very ruthless tactics intent on doing the job. I don't want to create a situation where the PCs can't win, though sometimes I do create situations where they have to run. They usually figure out it's time to run by the time a few PCs are down. I get a little worried when things get so hectic they start saying, "This looks like a TPK." That usually only happens if they start dropping too fast without doing any damage to the opponent. That's usually a sign I made the encounter too strong.

 

[steeldragons]

You continuously show a lack of understanding of the concept I'm talking about.

Mr. Goosepot, may I introduce to you Mr. Ganderkettle.

The goal of a DM is to challenge a party without killing them and this is how you interpret that, "And I have no idea why you feel the need to protect your party from that fight." When a person keeps making a statement that shows a lack of comprehension of the topic being discussed, what else can you do to explain it?

I would begin by correcting the core statement into a way that can be comprehended...Let me give this a try for you...I like helping.

"The goal of the DM is to challenge a party without killing them...to me." OR

"I think<or believe or feel or understand> the goal of the DM is to challenge the party without killing them..." OR

"I prefer to run my games where the DM challenges a party without killing them..."

OR...ANY frickin' way in which you can put this without making an absolute statement.

You have made repeated statements that you don't feel the DM should kill a party. This leads one to the conclusion (and is supported by some examples) you hold your monsters back and/or create your "challenges"/gage your encounters so as to be -for lack of a better word- "suitable" for the party they are facing...purposely making them beatable, purposely not killing them.

@Hemlock [as best I can tell] is not saying he purposely is out to kill the party (which you are asserting he is...over and over) but is saying that that is not a necessary part of the [his] definition of a DM...That he doesn't "build challenges" but creates an organic world in which the party can interact. If they can handle it, great, but they aren't "due" automatically manageable bits. They can do "smart" or they can do "stupid" or they can do "tactical" or "run away" or however, but they are not, necessarily, going to be presented [in all cases] with stage-piece scenarios that are mathematically calculated to be beatable because, "as the DM [his] job is to challenge the party without killing them."

I believe @Tony Vargas has the right of it and it is a simple new/old school/playstyle disconnect that you, apparently, are the one unable to parse what is being explained to you...not the other way around. (and possibly both of you, but I don't really see that from what I'm reading)

Now...back to coffee.

Happy Sunday, all!

EDIT PS: Note to Self: gnome or halfling NPC named "Mr. Ganderkettle" ...with or without a cohort/friend/business partner named Goosepot"...maybe "Goosepotts".../EDIT