Why Does The Term "Healbot" Ride Alone?

[Leatherhead]

I wonder why nobody has brought up "Murderhobo" yet.

 

[Hussar]

I'd hardly call the moniker "bot" complimentary.

But, yeah, it's a description of the (usually) NPC cleric that does nothing to add to the game but heal. They don't talk, they don't ever reference their faith, they have no connections to anything in the game world and never, ever have the spotlight. They're a mobile HP battery.

When it's done by a player, then we're into deadhead player territory. The kind of player who adds nothing to the game but a heartbeat. The kind of player that doesn't get that gaming is a collaborative exercise, rather than just the DM being there to dance for his or her entertainment.

 

[DammitVictor]

Beatsticks and meatshields get to make meaningful choices across every combat. They're active participants in the game.

The healbot waits until the combat is over to tickle his teammates with his wand of CLW. His only real choices are to do his job or not do his job for funny in-character reasons that nobody appreciates.

 

[Gorgon Zee]

Classic D&D requires a healer. It doesn't require anything else, really. At high levels it's all about magic users, but that's not really the role, it's just the power curve. I played a lot of 3.0 / 3.5 / PF1 and anytime people were forming groups, the role of healer was the most requested. I ran an AD&D campaign recently. The cleric took healing spells. Pretty much nothing else, because it's more effective to heal a barbarian with 18/45 strength than it is to cast other spells.

Essentially, it's a major design flaw. And a common way of overcoming it was to have an NPC character that did nothing but fix the flaw. It provided healing so the party could do fun things. As a simple fix for bad design, it needed no personality and can simply be called on to heal on demand -- it was a Healbot.

D&D4E fixed the problem -- no healbots in 4E games -- and I'm not sure I've seen a game since introduce the concept of requiring one player to do something boring to keep the game running. Thankfully. So I'd regard it as an artifact of bad design that we have learned from and will gradually die out.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Yeah, we had a 'healbot' all the time back in 2E, and it was just as has been said... a party NPC ran by the DM that went around with us and did nothing except heal the rest of the party.

While I'm sure MMOs popularized the name, they didn't really coin it.

 

[dragoner]

Now I'm thinking about an actual mobile autodoc ...

 

[macd21]

I wonder why nobody has brought up "Murderhobo" yet.

Because it’s a play style, not a class. A murder hobo could be a fighter, wizard, thief, even a healbot!

 

[Nagol]

We had meat shields as the first adopted moniker, Heal stations as the second. Wiz-bangs. The poor Thief rarely got the attention.

 

[macd21]

Why is there a derisive name for a character whose main contribution is keeping the party alive but not for other characters with one dimensional characters? Okay, I suppose "meatshield" exists too but I get the sense that it does not quite have the same tone to it. Why is there no "killdrone" or "stealbot" though? Why he implied disdain of the one who keeps you from having to roll a new character?

Because people want to play a ‘kill drone’ or a ‘stealbot.’ It’s not that people have disdain for healers, necessarily, it’s that they have disdain for badly designed healer classes.

Healbot originated in MMOs, but quickly transferred over to RPGs, especially DnD, obviously referring to the cleric. Now, consider the cleric: he can wear heavy armour, smack people with his mace, has decent hit points, can turn undead, and has a good range of spells. Yet back in the day, their most important trait was cure light wounds. Hell, if you dared waste a precious spell slot casting something else, you could get some dirty looks from the rest of the party!

So you had a class whose biggest perceived contribution to the group could be replicated by access to a wand of cure light wounds.

Later editions improved the cleric’s other abilities (especially spells) so that this was no longer the case.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Because people want to play a ‘kill drone’ or a ‘stealbot.’ It’s not that people have disdain for healers, necessarily, it’s that they have disdain for badly designed healer classes.

Why is a healer whose only personality is "If someone is injured, then I cast cure," less fun than a fighter whose only personality is "If it looks hostile, then I attack it"?

Why would a (hypothetical) healer that could only heal, be any worse of a design than a fighter that could only attack?