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

[AbdulAlhazred]

The bookkeeping it generates isn't very popular, but there's merit in the concept.

Our compromise is that spells whose material components don't have any significant cost are handwaved as being present provided you've got your components pouch (and you're somewhat knackered as a caster if you lose it or it gets destroyed), but any components with significant cost e.g. the 100+ g.p. pearl required for Identify have to be tracked and recorded.

But that still doesn't help when it comes to trying to force a limit by spell level, which slots do and spell points don't.

Right. Of course if you really DID play by the AD&D casting rules, strictly, all of them, then magic was actually quite limited. They weren't really super practical rules to use, but there are actually a LOT of little things that hamper casting quite a bit. It would be a bit of a tangent to get into in this thread, but I've often thought it would make a fun sort of game to take the 1e PHB and have all the PCs be only Magic Users (everyone else would be hirelings, etc.) and run a game like that where the original intent of the rules was followed (PCs are rivals who only cooperate in a limited fashion, troupe play, lots of hirelings and such, strict use of the XP/training/treasure rules). The goal would be to become the supreme wizard. I would generate some sort of a scenario that really made it a 'king of the hill' kind of game. Might be kinda fun!

 

[MichaelSomething]

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

You, sir, are a diamond in the rough.

 

[Oofta]

Right. Of course if you really DID play by the AD&D casting rules, strictly, all of them, then magic was actually quite limited. They weren't really super practical rules to use, but there are actually a LOT of little things that hamper casting quite a bit. It would be a bit of a tangent to get into in this thread, but I've often thought it would make a fun sort of game to take the 1e PHB and have all the PCs be only Magic Users (everyone else would be hirelings, etc.) and run a game like that where the original intent of the rules was followed (PCs are rivals who only cooperate in a limited fashion, troupe play, lots of hirelings and such, strict use of the XP/training/treasure rules). The goal would be to become the supreme wizard. I would generate some sort of a scenario that really made it a 'king of the hill' kind of game. Might be kinda fun!

I tried an all mage party in 2E, it did not end well. Group of 5 wizard-type PCs all level 3 were TPKed by a pair of low level (CR 1 equivalent) thugs.

The players decided never again.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This is something that really struck me about 4e's* combat design: it invariably seemed to be set up such that the party would get hammered in the first round or two and then be able to fight back and win the day...and then do it all again.

Fine once in a while, but when every combat goes like this it gets far too predictable, and thus dull in a hurry.

* - other editions did this as well but whenever I've converted and run a 4e module it always seem to somehow be more blatant or noticeable, at least from the DM side.

The basic parameters of 4e combat and healing does seem to be intended to make this sort of a highly repeatable outcome. However, it is far from hard-coded into the system to a degree where it just happens every fight. Truthfully the most likely outcome of a 4e encounter is that the monsters never quite rise to the level of being able to push the party super hard, and then it will tail out into a cleanup at the end, with choices being more about who is going to accept a bit of HS loss and is it worth burning a daily instead, etc.
What I found though, was that 4e creates the huge potential for a sort of 'gonzo' type of super-dynamic encounters where you can pretty much just unleash your inner Steven Spielberg and build very action-packed and thrilling encounters. This largely falls flat in something like 1e, where the chance a player is going to take the risk of doing some crazy action hero stuff is low since the risk of hit point loss is a big problem. The other problem being that the vague rules mean who knows what the risks really are? At best you know your DM well enough to 'play' them, but the game mechanics itself doesn't help you much at all here, except at very high levels where wizards tend to be able to deploy some fait accompli and just shut the whole encounter down hard anyway.

 

[Tony Vargas]

This largely falls flat in something like 1e, where the chance a player is going to take the risk of doing some crazy action hero stuff is low since the risk of hit point loss is a big problem.

I think one thing D&D design has finally figured out, at his late date, is that player options should actually work, or they won't be used. I've seen them, in 5e design, finally getting away from requiring cascades of success to do something even moderately cool. You don't see as many "make check, then attack, then there's a contested roll or a save, then, finally something cool might happen" sub-systems as you used to.

 

[Charlaquin]

The basic parameters of 4e combat and healing does seem to be intended to make this sort of a highly repeatable outcome. However, it is far from hard-coded into the system to a degree where it just happens every fight. Truthfully the most likely outcome of a 4e encounter is that the monsters never quite rise to the level of being able to push the party super hard, and then it will tail out into a cleanup at the end, with choices being more about who is going to accept a bit of HS loss and is it worth burning a daily instead, etc.
What I found though, was that 4e creates the huge potential for a sort of 'gonzo' type of super-dynamic encounters where you can pretty much just unleash your inner Steven Spielberg and build very action-packed and thrilling encounters. This largely falls flat in something like 1e, where the chance a player is going to take the risk of doing some crazy action hero stuff is low since the risk of hit point loss is a big problem. The other problem being that the vague rules mean who knows what the risks really are? At best you know your DM well enough to 'play' them, but the game mechanics itself doesn't help you much at all here, except at very high levels where wizards tend to be able to deploy some fait accompli and just shut the whole encounter down hard anyway.

One thing I think most people will agree 4e did well was make every combat feel like an epic tactical set piece. Which seemed like a great idea at the time - make every fight feel like the coolest, most exciting fights of past editions. The problem that this lead to was that while each encounter was dynamic, the adventures overall felt less dynamic. When every encounter is a high-tension set piece, the adventure can’t have the natural ebb and flow of tension necessary for a strong narrative engagement curve. That, and it can end up taking a long time.

 

[Tony Vargas]

One thing I think most people will agree 4e did well was make every combat feel like an epic tactical set piece. Which seemed like a great idea at the time - make every fight feel like the coolest, most exciting fights of past editions. The problem that this lead to was that while each encounter was dynamic, the adventures overall felt less dynamic.

Basically, it didn't do boring well enough.


You could do boring, though, - as boring as any 5e 'easy' encounter or 1e combat vs less-than-1-HD critters - you just had to color outside the lines a bit. Party of 5 vs an Elite, minions vs party 2:1 odds, or even 1:1 for a real quickie, underleveld standards for a long boring combat instead of a mercifully brief one...
...well, and you had to want to run a boring encounter, for reasons of story flow or whatever...

 

[Charlaquin]

Basically, it didn't do boring well enough.


You could do boring, though, - as boring as any 5e 'easy' encounter or 1e combat vs less-than-1-HD critters - you just had to color outside the lines a bit. Party of 5 vs an Elite, minions vs party 2:1 odds, or even 1:1 for a real quickie, underleveld standards for a long boring combat instead of a mercifully brief one...
...well, and you had to want to run a boring encounter, for reasons of story flow or whatever...

True. That’s another thing 4e did well, was making encounter building very flexible and easy.

 

[Chaosmancer]

@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:



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.

I apologize if my imprecise language caused an issue. I never meant to say the players couldn't win DnD. That's not even a thing.

However, they can end up in a series of choices where every outcome is negative, or where they are stuck in a repeating cycle of events that they have no power to overcome.

For example, I believe it was earlier in this thread where someone pointed out they had a 3.5 game where they were using the natural healing rules, but were caught out in the wilderness. They bunkered up, but before they could fully heal, a random encounter occured that dropped their hp back down. So, they bunkered up again, and the same happened.

The players have no recourse in this scenario, unless they have a cleric or other healer. Because in the time it takes them to heal, they are attacked and brought back down into dangerous territory.

And, again, I do wonder about the differences in handling players choosing to rest. You say you "never" put the players in a situation where they cannot "win" because too much time has passed, but you also say there are consequences for waiting. However, if they were struggling enough that they missed your presumed idea of how long it would take, and that happens more than once, wouldn't the consequences stack, and could that stack not lead to a situation that the PCs simply cannot overcome except by the DM handing them a new path to follow which allows them to overcome it?


We all handle downtime differently, and I think that assuming that players can just choose downtime and nothing directly happens to them is not supported by a few different styles of play. For example, a game I am in as a player has us defending a town full of survivors. If we are injured and choose not to fight an army marching on our town... our town gets destroyed, and if we were resting in that town... well, we might be captured or killed. We are forced into this conflict, because there is no "safe place" where we can take two weeks and not do any adventuring. We are under constant assault and threat from various forces.

If a demon is to be summoned in the catacombs of the city, and you decide to rest in the inn for a week letting it happens, unless the demon was weaker than you feared you just ended up with a massive demon problem on top of your other problems, and you can't really just "keep resting" because you are in the city where it is happening.

And since safe rest cannot be guaranteed, the longer it takes, the more likely the party will be faced with a challenge they are unprepared and unhealed for.

 

[Helldritch]

I tried an all mage party in 2E, it did not end well. Group of 5 wizard-type PCs all level 3 were TPKed by a pair of low level (CR 1 equivalent) thugs.

The players decided never again.

Strange, the group I had tried with an (almost) all mage was one that I would not like to see again too. But for a very different reason. They were plowing through adventures like crazy. Nothing was stopping them, even a beholder was not enough... It was second edition at that time. Human mage, human mage, Half elf cleric/magic user, Elf (mage/thief), Elf fighter/mage and... a dwarf fighter (go figure). Calling initiative and hearing Fire ball, fire ball, ice storm, cone of cold and lightning bolt being cast was quite a sight, especially when the dwarf was saying: "I'll wait and kill whatever survive, IF something survives...). By the end, they all had wands, staves and whatever was needed to do their trade. It was quite a group.