D&D 5E 5e, Heal Thyself! Is Healing Too Weak in D&D?

[Fenris-77]

Yup, 5E has that big gorilla weight.

 

[pemerton]

@EzekielRaiden

I think your post 86 provides an interesting analysis/response to @Manbearcat's earlier post, flagging that 4e both (i) has a lot of out-of-combat healing, and (ii) makes in-combat healing extremely consequential.

 

[Lyxen]

Honestly, I think a lot of people play 5e not because it's their game of choice, but because it's the one most people are playing right now. The hype train is very real, and each new book seems splashier and more amazing than the last- the proven WotC strategy! The slower production cycle probably has an effect.

And then, once more, to get a unicorn (and 5e certainly is in the TTRPG business), you need a product that customers find good, some luck, and not make business mistakes. ALL of them. If your product is not good to your customers, it won't work.

Again though, my point of contention is not whether 5e is good or bad. It does some things I like, it does some things I don't like. It comes down to whether it's good because it's popular, or if it's popular because it's good- that's a subjective opinion.

Nope, especially in this day and age, things which are not good don't become and even less stay popular for long. I know some people won't allow themselves to say that something popular is good, but honestly...

I mean, the fourth most popular pizza topping in the world is onions.

And yet, you had to go down to the fourth one to get that result. But does it mean that pizza is bad ?

And does it mean that D&D is bad because there are some sub-rules about healer that don't please you ?

But that's not really a metric that says "onions are great!/onions are a plague upon pizza!"

Would-be healers are clearly a plague upon 5e, the pizza of TTRPGs.

 

[James Gasik]

And then, once more, to get a unicorn (and 5e certainly is in the TTRPG business), you need a product that customers find good, some luck, and not make business mistakes. ALL of them. If your product is not good to your customers, it won't work.



Nope, especially in this day and age, things which are not good don't become and even less stay popular for long. I know some people won't allow themselves to say that something popular is good, but honestly...



And yet, you had to go down to the fourth one to get that result. But does it mean that pizza is bad ?

And does it mean that D&D is bad because there are some sub-rules about healer that don't please you ?



Would-be healers are clearly a plague upon 5e, the pizza of TTRPGs.

I'm not too keen on #1 either, pepperoni, because my local pizza place uses thin slices that end up crispy and not very tasty, but I've had good pepperoni on pizza, so it's more debatable. Again, and that I need to keep saying this is bothersome, it's not about whether D&D 5e is good or bad.

That's subjective. Everyone has something they like about it, and everyone has something they don't like about it. Well ok, I'm sure there are some people who claim to hate everything about 5e, and others that claim to love absolutely every bit of it, but I'm dubious if such people actually exist instead of just claiming that is how they feel.

But the "well it must be good because it sells good" comment feels dismissive to me. I keep being told that Fighter is the most popular class. Does that mean the Fighter is good and the Cleric is bad?

 

[Lyxen]

I'm not too keen on #1 either, pepperoni, because my local pizza place uses thin slices that end up crispy and not very tasty, but I've had good pepperoni on pizza, so it's more debatable. Again, and that I need to keep saying this is bothersome, it's not about whether D&D 5e is good or bad.

That's subjective. Everyone has something they like about it, and everyone has something they don't like about it. Well ok, I'm sure there are some people who claim to hate everything about 5e, and others that claim to love absolutely every bit of it, but I'm dubious if such people actually exist instead of just claiming that is how they feel.

And I'm not saying it either. I'm certainly not saying it's perfect. But, clearly, it's a good game, and it's a good edition of D&D. It does not mean that everyone will think it so, it just means that a majority of people find it that way.

But the "well it must be good because it sells good" comment feels dismissive to me. I keep being told that Fighter is the most popular class. Does that mean the Fighter is good and the Cleric is bad?

See above, it just means that there are more people finding it good than people finding it bad. Moreover, the difference is not that great, whereas, in terms of TTRPG, there is a huge difference between D&D and other games, just as there is a huge difference between 5e and other editions. A factor of what, 5, 10 ? And please don't serve me the BS of "it's because of WotC's clout", they LOST this with 4e, Pathfinder took the lead and they could have kept it with the clout that they had at the time, if 5e had not come out, the right way, with the right product, a good product.

 

[DEFCON 1]

And why haven't any of you people who don't like the healing rules in 5E just changed them for your table? The game has been out for 8 years. Have you all just been suffering in silence this entire time? That seems to have been... unnecessary.

And also... so the game doesn't allow you to play every single concept you can think of in an optimal way. Some ways cannot be optimized without adjusting rules. Some ways can't really be done at all without new concepts or re-writes. This should not be a shock to anyone, and is the entire reason games like Champions / Hero System were created... in order to give players the ability to build almost any single concept they could think of in an RPG and have it be pretty balanced across the entire spectrum of the gameplay.

D&D ain't Hero System and it would take a lot of work to turn it into something approaching it. Just ask Steve Kenson.

 

[James Gasik]

And why haven't any of you people who don't like the healing rules in 5E just changed them for your table? The game has been out for 8 years. Have you all just been suffering in silence this entire time? That seems to have been... unnecessary.

And also... so the game doesn't allow you to play every single concept you can think of in an optimal way. Some ways cannot be optimized without adjusting rules. Some ways can't really be done at all without new concepts or re-writes. This should not be a shock to anyone, and is the entire reason games like Champions / Hero System were created... in order to give players the ability to build almost any single concept they could think of in an RPG and have it be pretty balanced across the entire spectrum of the gameplay.

D&D ain't Hero System and it would take a lot of work to turn it into something approaching it. Just ask Steve Kenson.

Because you're not always the one who can change things. Sometimes you're the guy playing a Cleric and sighing that you can't have the nice things you want, because you're being presented with nice things you didn't ask for.

And as far as the game not supporting every concept, this isn't some alien thing like wanting to play a guy who dual wields whips or a monk that uses pistols (oh wait, I guess that might be viable). I'm talking about CASTING A GOOD HEALING SPELL. If that's a foreign concept to D&D, sign me up for being a point defense laser turret, I guess.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Because you're not always the one who can change things. Sometimes you're the guy playing a Cleric and sighing that you can't have the nice things you want, because you're being presented with nice things you didn't ask for.

And as far as the game not supporting every concept, this isn't some alien thing like wanting to play a guy who dual wields whips or a monk that uses pistols (oh wait, I guess that might be viable). I'm talking about CASTING A GOOD HEALING SPELL. If that's a foreign concept to D&D, sign me up for being a point defense laser turret, I guess.

You've had eight years to find a DM that would change things for you if you were unhappy. If you've not done so for whatever your reasons were... sorry to hear that. But WotC isn't going to change their entire philosophy of 5E game design just because you're stuck in a game relationship you don't enjoy. At some point you're going to have to be the point person of your own happiness, because if you are waiting on WotC you're pretty much going to be eternally unhappy throughout the entirety of the game's existence.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

The thread is an interesting design question (D&D design in particular).

However, I'm curious why you come to the conclusion above given 4e's paradigm; pretty much ubiquitous innate and massive out-of-combat healing which leads to full HP at the start of each scene (assuming available HSes...which is a safe assumption) while simultaneously featuring the most prolific and most consequential in-combat healing in the history of D&D.

Two things-

First, the key qualifier is, "For me ..." In discussing the various knobs to twiddle, for me that is they way to approach it.

Second is your approach (explicitly referring to 4e)- I think the post I was referring to (FitztheRuke) mentioned various ways to tinker with the system, including changing the monsters, etc. Without putting too fine a point on it, 5e is not built up in the same way as 4e; while you could, theoretically, use the same approach ... if you wanted to make combat meaningful and consequential while greatly increasing healing (with both full hit points before every scene AND meaningful in-combat healing), you'd really have to re-think monsters and combat from the ground up (IMO), which is beyond the scope of most people. At a certain point, you'd be better off just playing 4e than modifying 5e if that was your goal.

That was kind of the point of the post- 5e is not balanced in such a way that this is an option, and would require extensive work to make it that way.

 

[tetrasodium]

And why haven't any of you people who don't like the healing rules in 5E just changed them for your table? The game has been out for 8 years. Have you all just been suffering in silence this entire time? That seems to have been... unnecessary.

And also... so the game doesn't allow you to play every single concept you can think of in an optimal way. Some ways cannot be optimized without adjusting rules. Some ways can't really be done at all without new concepts or re-writes. This should not be a shock to anyone, and is the entire reason games like Champions / Hero System were created... in order to give players the ability to build almost any single concept they could think of in an RPG and have it be pretty balanced across the entire spectrum of the gameplay.

D&D ain't Hero System and it would take a lot of work to turn it into something approaching it. Just ask Steve Kenson.

How it needs to change depends on why you don't like iit. the way death saves nullify damage beyond zero plus small heals along with out of combat healing really complicates the act of changing it as something other than change for the sake of change.

It does not help matters that all of the dmg rules to start from with that goal:
* crank the dial to 11 like surges without the kinds of restrictions 4e put on nonsurge healing
*are pointless like healers kit dependency
"introduce an ever growing list of one off things that need judgements calls from the gm on top of treating interclsss balance like a piñata between short/long rest classes and spell/ability durations almost never being pegged to rest lengths.

Let's say someone thinks making healing word a third level spell will solve problems with wackamole because that's the tool for that job... 1hp LoH & healing breeze or whatever from celestial waock will immediately step in to route around the change without skipping a beat.. I know that because it's exactly what the Barbarian Paladin Druid Bard sorclocj group I pulled into raveloft to impose heal kit dependency on did. The group had so many healing words that nobody even realized the airlock was a celestial warlock who just had never used healing light or whatever until healing word was made a level 3 spell.