D&D 5E Those who come from earlier editions, why are you okay with 5E healing (or are you)?

[MichaelSomething]

I would vastly prefer a game where the healer was a valued member of the party, and where the allocation of healing was an important resource to be managed.

As has been stated many times, there was never any edition of the game where a healer was required. You always had the option of resorting to natural healing, and simply changing the pace of the adventure, if nobody wanted to play a healer.

To quote Honest Game Trailers, "Medic, the class everyone loves but no one wants to play."

Ok, a more articulate answer might be required here. The goal in a lower rate of healing such as I am doing (that is no hp recover unless you spend HD) is not to make the healer a heal bot. It is to force players to think, to plan, to be better adventurers. Having no healers in my game is a choice that has been made quite often and the players were all about not getting so hurt that they would've to spend all their HD. Healing kit, potions and salves were bought without a second thought. Skills like alchemy, herbalist and medicine becomes much more important all of a sudden.

 

[Fanaelialae]

It happens in mine often enough and I've no intention of changing anything.

Yes they've got sometimes-hard choices to make: do we spend a day or two getting Arziel back on her feet and maybe lose our strategic advantage, or do we press our advantage and in so doing put Arziel at rather significant risk of dying.

I want those choices.

Much more common here is that they want to rest when the casters are running low on spells. Otherwise, this is just a variant on the second option I present above: press on and hope Arziel survives it.

Fix it?

In a well-run situation where resource management matters, a death spiral - or the threat of one - means the DM is doing it right: forcing hard choices as to whether to find/create a way to knock off and recover resources or to carry on with what's left and hope for the best.

And it's not necessarily on the DM to give downtime, it's on the players/PCs to find a way to make it happen.

The thing is, you can have those choices even with standard out-of-the-book 5e healing.

I've seen it at my table, and I seriously doubt I'm the only one. We've been low on HP, out of HD, and low on spells, with a pressing need to continue on despite all that. I've had sessions where we were forced to flee from multiple encounters as a result of being depleted, certain that we were moments away from a TPK.

All it changes is the time scale. With standard resting, that generally needs to fall inside a day or two. With a longer rest variant you have more time to squeeze in the fights (but if the party decides that they can't press on and opt to rest, you're waiting a correspondingly longer period for them to recover).

Either way is perfectly fine, depending on your tastes.

Not everyone wants to have to squeeze multiple combats into a single day. It's arguably why they chose to include gritty healing as an official option in the DMG.

Conversely, not everyone wants to sit around doing nothing, waiting for their characters to heal. This becomes doubly an issue when random encounters are a thing. I can recall numerous occasions in older editions where the party became stuck in a healing rut. We didn't have a proper healer and were stuck primarily with natural resting (I think someone also had a NWP that allowed them to restore and extra 1d3 HP per day). But, despite our best attempts to obscure our camp site, hostile random encounters just kept showing up. We'd heal a little, monster would show up, and we'd lose it all again. It felt like being mired in mud. Wanting to get to the fun but unable to. Hence my preference for the standard 5e method.

Just pointing out that you can still have decisions as to whether to press on when depleted, even with the standard 5e healing rules.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

Well there could be a narrative where nobody loses playing with their own character but some kind of narrative stress happens. This falls into the realm of play to see what happens.
Or the tension could be between a story consequence and a mechanical one (waiting to heal vs pushing on). Obviously the basic 5e rules only support that during an adventure day. Having slower healing or 'wounds' of some sort allows for a wider variety of scenarios.
If I ran 5e, I would have a way to do this, but I don't need to have it be strictly just a dice mediated thing. I would have it be a choice that the GM or player can invoke.

OK. Like a skill challenge-type thing to treat a serious injury? Or a sidequest to find a specific item needed to clear a festering wound?
That sort of thing?

Which is the reason that this thread exists: to address the vast disparity between 5E and older editions. The rules of 5E agree with the lies told about older editions, and no longer agree with the reality described by older editions.

I'm missing something. What are the lies told about older editions?

Because D&D has always used HP, and people had been using those HP to create meaningful narratives for decades. And then suddenly 4E came along, and you see a huge backlash from people who can't use it to create meaningful narratives anymore; because the rules suddenly agreed with the propaganda that a "hit" is actually "abstract whatever"; rather than the rules saying that a "hit" is actually a "hit" in spite of the propaganda, as they had for decades. And then 5E came along, and copied that aspect from 4E, in spite of every traditional player who hated it.

A "hit" has never actually been a "hit" outside of instances like 3e's Touch AC. But what do you mean by "propaganda?

2) Why would a player sit out sessions? That would be poor GMing, IMO. In my case, if one or more PCs were injured badly enough to rest for multiple days, it would be handled no differently than them having to rest 1 day.

If having to rest for multiple long rests are handled no differently than having to rest for one, what is the actual difference on play? (I'm using "rest" instead of "day" because needing a week or similar for a long rest is an official variant that seems to be commonly used.

If you really can't imagine what that would look like, the play would go something like this (obviously details would be different for any given scenario):
a. The party decides how to safely retreat to a place where they'll be safe to rest
b. They make their journey there
c. The party goes into downtime for a few days (in character) while the wounded PCs rest. This is treated like any other downtime, maybe some of the healthy ones restock supplies, buy equipment, bank some treasure, get items inspected, etc.
d. Cut the camera to the scene where the party is recovered and ready to go back out on the trail again
In terms of table-time, not more time is spent on a weeklong rest than a night's rest, unless there is a good reason to explore that downtime more deeply (some plot event going on where it makes sense to).

I can imagine what it would look like. I just don't see what the effective difference is between waiting for one rest and waiting for several. - Apart from the spellcasters getting multiple recoveries of spells back while the injured characters are still recovering.

4) Another benefit is tension. When a party realizes that all their character resources are reset every 24 hours, they take the same risk every day -- there is no variation. However, if they know that severe damage in a given battle risks them needing to rest for an extended period of time, they need to make strategic decisions. Maybe they decide attacking the troll is a bad idea at their level because they are under time-pressure to save some refugees and can't take that risk. But if they don't kill the troll it might leave and ravage the countryside. Decisions, decisions...

How is that distinction different from changing the rest period? It would just mean that spellcaster resources become more available than the HP of the melee-type characters.

I agree GMing style plays a large factor in this. I would not put the party in a situation where they choose "yeah let's leave Arziel behind because we just can't wait for them to heal." You're putting forward a hypothetical problem that just doesn't happen in my games.

Also, it's very rare that after a series of combats, only one PC is injured and needs to recover. What's more likely to happen once one of the PCs is injured is that the party does not rest at all, but rather this party member hangs back and does not participate in combat as much, and tries to stay safe, and eventually other PCs take some hits, and now enough people are injured (and out of healing) that they decide to rest as a group.

That sounds like the exact same dynamic as my groups, with the only difference being that spells are depleted as well as hit points. The party will generally try to rest when one or the other (but usually both) are getting low.

I would vastly prefer a game where the healer was a valued member of the party, and where the allocation of healing was an important resource to be managed.

Do you feel that in 5e, a healer is not valued and that managing the allocation of healing resources (spells, class abilities, HD, potions etc) is not (or maybe just less) important?

 

[Chaosmancer]

I agree GMing style plays a large factor in this. I would not put the party in a situation where they choose "yeah let's leave Arziel behind because we just can't wait for them to heal." You're putting forward a hypothetical problem that just doesn't happen in my games.

Also, it's very rare that after a series of combats, only one PC is injured and needs to recover. What's more likely to happen once one of the PCs is injured is that the party does not rest at all, but rather this party member hangs back and does not participate in combat as much, and tries to stay safe, and eventually other PCs take some hits, and now enough people are injured (and out of healing) that they decide to rest as a group.

I like how you say it is very rare, then explain what is likely to happen when your party encounters that exact same issue... which is exactly the option I said my group would avoid.

Because, even if it doesn't reflect mechanically, my players treat each fight as a fight where they could die. So, having a PC just hang back and not fight is something we wouldn't do. First off, because it feels wrong for the character. Secondly, because a combat could take an hour or more to resolve, and leaving someone to get bored watching us play is not desirable either.

But, that is all tangential to the issue.

If you truly wish to take away "unrealistic healing" from the game, then you take away short and long rests. Which means players have no options for healing except magical healing. That makes this scenario more likely, and actually depending on the party make-up, trying to cycle the PCs can be even worse.

After all, when the Paladin and Fighter are too injured to stand on the front-lines, can the Rogue still hide and snipe, flitting in and out of sight.... not really, unless the injured members are far away from the battle. Because the enemy will just charge them and kill them before focusing on the rogue. Wizard as a front-liner? They haven't gotten hit yet, so it is their turn to take hp damage. How many hits will they take before the battle goes incredibly south?

In all the years I've been a DM (I started in 2nd Edition) I have neither played nor DMed a game where this happened. If this kind of thing is happening, the DM should figure out how to fix it; this sounds like a real clusterf***.

Considering the death spiral is pretty well documented in combats (a party member drops, lowering the party's damage output, slowing down their offensive making it more likely the next party memeber will drop, especially as it lowers the number of viable targets for the enemy) and the slower healing methods make it more likely parties will enter an adventure with less hp than they normally would, making it even easier for the entire party to be on the ropes...

Yeah, this will be pretty common, if a massive reduction in healing was widely adopted. Maybe not at your table because of whatever reasons you care to think, but considering it is a thing that already happens, it will just get worse.

Also, there is a very easy way for DMs to fix it. Never drop a party member to zero hp. Or if you do, reduce the challenge of the combat proportionally.

Otherwise, since it is a direct result of lowering the combat potential of one group over the other.... that isn't really something that can be "fixed".

The narrative generated by a game of Monopoly does not have to be believable. Nobody is going to complain about how it's unrealistic or implausible to earn money from real estate while simultaneously claiming that you can't afford to get out of jail.

RPGs are supposed to generate a believable narrative. If they don't, then someone will call it out.

Ah, I see what you meant now.

I disagree, and have the historical evidence to back it up.

Some of the most famous DnD adventures ever. Tomb of Horrors, White Plume Mountain, Barrier Peaks. I'm sure you get the idea. Those narratives are far from believable. In fact, White Plume is one that I've been told repeatedly is a "Fun House Dungeon" where the traps and challenges really don't make a lot of sense.

Seeing how those adventures were made decades ago, and are some of the most iconic and memorable adventures, since they have no believable narrative DnD would have imploded. It didn't. Still going strong, and still remaking some of those adventures.

Some games play wth minimal narrative and just kill monsters in tunnels for gold, others care about the socio-economic impact of killing a Lich King who has kept rule and stability for a thousand years. Both are treated equally, one is far more "believable" as a narrative. This standard you are claiming really doesn't exist as a facet of the game itself. It exists as a facet of the table, and is only as important as the people sitting down to play say it is.

 

[Doc_Klueless]

To quote Honest Game Trailers, "Medic, the class everyone loves but no one wants to play."

LOL. I'm the odd man out. I love playing the medic. LOVE it.

 

[Big J Money]

@Anyone who responded to my comment on never seeing the described "death spiral":

I may have misunderstood what was meant by this term, because when I said that I've never seen it happen before, I was responding to the original description of it, which was:

And then, without full resources, the party gets even more injured, forcing even more downtime, and if you don't just end up giving them the time needed to recover, you can end up in an unwinnable death spiral.

My reading of this definition of death spiral is:

1. Party does not have full resources because they've been in battle a few times and have not long rested yet
2. Party gets more injured and cannot heal further -- they must make downtime if they wish to heal
3. The DM decides that this downtime is a hard and fast rule -- the players must take the time to rest or continue on; it won't happen as quickly as overnight
4. Now the game is unwinnable -- The PCs are doomed to fail

^^ I have never seen this happen in all my years of playing D&D. What I have seen happen is one of 2 things:

A) The party decides it's time to rest after all, and they take the down time (I never put the PCs in a situation where an adventure is "unwinnable" beause too much time has passed, however I do create consequences. They simply have to live with the consuquences, or sometimes undo them)
B) The party decides they want to take the risk, and they either pull ahead as champions with gret luck, or one or more of them are killed in a bloody battle. If there is a TPK, we roll up new charaacters and continue on.

In neither case is the game "unwinnable". The world changes, consequences of course always happen, but some protagonists will always rise. I suppose a group of players could decide they no longer want to play D&D after a TPK but that hasn't happened to me, yet. One of my procedures of play in D&D is that every player has a backup character already made for when theirs dies.

 

[CleverNickName]

Would people prefer the return of the five minute adventuring day and requiring healbots?

Prefer it in general? Or prefer it over instant, automatic, and complete healing after an 8-hour nap?

I would prefer the game have neither. I would love it if the game were set up to reward players for strategy and careful resource management, but that's a pretty tall order. And it probably wouldn't be very popular, either.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Would people prefer the return of the five minute adventuring day and requiring healbots?

No. I’d prefer even an earlier time before that. When PCs weren’t assured of regaining all resources after 8 hours, when they didn’t know when rests were available, and planned accordingly. When a dungeon was treated as an entire dungeon, not broken up into convenient meta game encounters for all intents and purposes broken up into separate dungeons, one per adventuring day. When you didn’t have players going all Leeroy Jenkins into each encounter because they assumed they’d just regain all resources after a rest, and all encounters were beatable with arena style combat. When players didn’t know how many fights they may have, so casters didn’t blow all their spells in the first couple (which also resulted in limiting the complaints of casters being overpowered, because they had to be more frugal with their spells while fighters kept going forever).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I would vastly prefer a game where the healer was a valued member of the party, and where the allocation of healing was an important resource to be managed.

As has been stated many times, there was never any edition of the game where a healer was required. You always had the option of resorting to natural healing, and simply changing the pace of the adventure, if nobody wanted to play a healer.

You've been around a pretty good long time though @Saelorn. You don't remember the whole story arc in, IIRC Snarfquest, which was literally titled "Don't Leave Town Without a Cleric", I think it was jokingly called "rule #1". No AD&D era party adventuring without a cleric would be likely to fare well. TECHNICALLY, yes, you could do it, PRACTICALLY, it was impossible. MAYBE if you had a party with like 2 druids in it (and only after 3rd level) and a paladin, you could eek by, until you found an NPC cleric to hire.

Anyway, in 4e, since I am more in tune with that, 'healers' are called 'leaders' and since the warlord, shaman, etc. all fall into that category there isn't a need for a true classic 'healbot cleric'. Leaders in that game are HIGHLY valued team members and force multipliers, and one of their core attributes is an ability to tactically translate healing surges into hit points. Some of these classes, like Cleric, also have some other fairly potent 'recovery' abilities. There are also some mechanisms, like certain rituals, which are usually healer territory, which allow for some limited HS transference, which is a pretty potent ability.
Now, at least by pure RAW, 4e treats healing largely similarly to 5e in terms of recovery, and 5e also has some potent non-cleric healers (I believe Bards are highly regarded in this respect, though I haven't played with one).
So, we must say that certain types of narrative have been improved by the new healing, and some have marginally been deprecated, but the overall result is a more 'heroic' default type of game. It sure seems like bending things back a bit in the other direction isn't all that hard. I would consider the sort of solution which was generally converged on in the 4e-era, which is to simply let the GM determine the exact value of a long rest based on the needs of the story and explained narratively in terms of unusual conditions, perhaps even a complete unavailability of any conditions suitable to resting at all in some cases. Time clocks, some mild tweaking of the core resting rules, etc. can provide further situational and general tuning where it makes sense.

In terms of all this narrative must make sense in only a certain specific narrow way or else the game is poop, come on. I challenge you to widen your horizons a bit. Nobody has to defend their tastes, but there's a segment of the D&D community which sure can get overly defensive and seems to harbor a, sometimes unvoiced, idea that only some sort of ideal of D&D as it was in 1974 is really 'right' and everyone else is full of it. I was there in 1974, really there, and this ideal never existed. People were always working around hit points (and other things) to try to achieve a game which was both practical to play, fun, and reproduced their favorite heroic fantasy tropes. That was never agreed as a consensus of exactly what they were after or how to get it, but it was always a lot wider than 'hit points MUST be meat!' and nobody ever really believed they were, except maybe the first 3 times they played. I know for a fact Gygax didn't believe that, nor did he run a game as if it was true. It won't hurt anyone, on either side of the debate, to just relax and be perfectly fine with varied interpretations. Luckily I think both of the last 2 editions of D&D have been fairly good in terms of supporting some version of either one.

 

[Helldritch]

You've been around a pretty good long time though @Saelorn. You don't remember the whole story arc in, IIRC Snarfquest, which was literally titled "Don't Leave Town Without a Cleric", I think it was jokingly called "rule #1". No AD&D era party adventuring without a cleric would be likely to fare well. TECHNICALLY, yes, you could do it, PRACTICALLY, it was impossible. MAYBE if you had a party with like 2 druids in it (and only after 3rd level) and a paladin, you could eek by, until you found an NPC cleric to hire.

Anyway, in 4e, since I am more in tune with that, 'healers' are called 'leaders' and since the warlord, shaman, etc. all fall into that category there isn't a need for a true classic 'healbot cleric'. Leaders in that game are HIGHLY valued team members and force multipliers, and one of their core attributes is an ability to tactically translate healing surges into hit points. Some of these classes, like Cleric, also have some other fairly potent 'recovery' abilities. There are also some mechanisms, like certain rituals, which are usually healer territory, which allow for some limited HS transference, which is a pretty potent ability.
Now, at least by pure RAW, 4e treats healing largely similarly to 5e in terms of recovery, and 5e also has some potent non-cleric healers (I believe Bards are highly regarded in this respect, though I haven't played with one).
So, we must say that certain types of narrative have been improved by the new healing, and some have marginally been deprecated, but the overall result is a more 'heroic' default type of game. It sure seems like bending things back a bit in the other direction isn't all that hard. I would consider the sort of solution which was generally converged on in the 4e-era, which is to simply let the GM determine the exact value of a long rest based on the needs of the story and explained narratively in terms of unusual conditions, perhaps even a complete unavailability of any conditions suitable to resting at all in some cases. Time clocks, some mild tweaking of the core resting rules, etc. can provide further situational and general tuning where it makes sense.

In terms of all this narrative must make sense in only a certain specific narrow way or else the game is poop, come on. I challenge you to widen your horizons a bit. Nobody has to defend their tastes, but there's a segment of the D&D community which sure can get overly defensive and seems to harbor a, sometimes unvoiced, idea that only some sort of ideal of D&D as it was in 1974 is really 'right' and everyone else is full of it. I was there in 1974, really there, and this ideal never existed. People were always working around hit points (and other things) to try to achieve a game which was both practical to play, fun, and reproduced their favorite heroic fantasy tropes. That was never agreed as a consensus of exactly what they were after or how to get it, but it was always a lot wider than 'hit points MUST be meat!' and nobody ever really believed they were, except maybe the first 3 times they played. I know for a fact Gygax didn't believe that, nor did he run a game as if it was true. It won't hurt anyone, on either side of the debate, to just relax and be perfectly fine with varied interpretations. Luckily I think both of the last 2 editions of D&D have been fairly good in terms of supporting some version of either one.

1st, I really like your post.
And yet, there must be a balance between what we had in 1ed and what we have now. I like the fact that now a healbot is no longer required but at the same time, healing overnight is way too fast (without the help of magic) and can easily lead to the 5mwd and unthinking tactics because "Hey! Who cares? We'll get healed overnight". We (I?) want to play heroic narrative, not a cartoonesque one.

I want to see heroes at my table, not reckless, unthinking whirlwinds. I want the heroes to beat the big bad guys but yet I want them to fear for their lives. We now have a variety of groups. In older edition a four man party was like: 1 fighter, 1 cleric, 1 rogue, 1 wizard. Sometimes the rogue was replaced by a fighter/wizard/thief or a fighter/thief. The fighter could be replaced either by a barbarian, cavalier, or ranger (in rarer instances we could see the odd ranger/cleric and if stats were there, a paladin). Never or almost, were the full cleric (sometimes a druid but even then....) and wizard (I think I saw only one illusionnist in 1ed era) replaced by something else.

Only a fifth or sixth character would bring a much needed diversity. This is where we could see various multiclass races appear like a gnome illusionist/thief, a monk, a druid or whatever else would fit the party and the players at that time.

Now we can have varied party for almost no risk of tpk, which is good. On the other hand, I feel that a riskless environment promotes bad thinking. I want to see players feel the need for magical healing. And if they don't have it, then I want to see them think twice before charging in that room full of goblins/kobolds/orcs or whatever.