D&D (2024) Bard Playtest discussion

[UngainlyTitan]

I didnt mean the healee needs to "spend" hit dice.

I mean that the spell itself heals an amount that the class determines.

Oh! ok, I misunderstood.

Though one of the advantages of the recipient of the heal spending HD was that it acted as a pacing mechanic other than the casters are out.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Yeah, I know people give me a lot of strange looks when I say healing needs to be buffed, but frankly that would prevent yo-yo healing almost immediately. If you could heal and that healing at least cancel a single monster's attack, then you would see people healing mid-combat more. But very quickly they realize that taking their action to only partially undo an opponents action is a terrible plan, so all healing gets regulated to either after the fight or when someone drops and it is an emergency action.

Definitely agree 100%.

Bolded bit is the key.

It's like, yeah, you can move into danger and use your entire Action to heal for less than a monster hits for! Great! That makes total sense! Even dimmer players quickly realize this is a "bad deal", especially compared to CC or even damage spells. Maybe you could heal them for 2d8+4, or, you could try and land a Hold Person (or whatever), likely stop them doing 2x that much damage for every round it stuck whilst also making them easy to kill!

The problem is 5E is balanced entirely for attrition/wear-down. The 6-8 combats a day. So the idea is absolutely that these heals are used out of combat or in emergencies, however wrong that feels, that's by design.

So we get the yoyo effect, up/down/up/down.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Definitely agree 100%.

Bolded bit is the key.

It's like, yeah, you can move into danger and use your entire Action to heal for less than a monster hits for! Great! That makes total sense! Even dimmer players quickly realize this is a "bad deal", especially compared to CC or even damage spells. Maybe you could heal them for 2d8+4, or, you could try and land a Hold Person (or whatever), likely stop them doing 2x that much damage for every round it stuck whilst also making them easy to kill!

The problem is 5E is balanced entirely for attrition/wear-down. The 6-8 combats a day. So the idea is absolutely that these heals are used out of combat or in emergencies, however wrong that feels, that's by design.

So we get the yoyo effect, up/down/up/down.

Maybe get rid of the emergencies part and have healing be out of combat only. It would certainly fit a lot of fiction. Add to that scaled healing based on the recipient and you've got yourself a system I would support.

 

[Chaosmancer]

If the player knows something but there is doubt if the character would know it, an Intelligence ability check with the appropriate skill can easily determine if the character happens to have come across it.

Every once in a while, a skeptical DM can ask for an ability check to confirm a piece of knowledge.

Sure, but there are certain things it makes sense for and certain things it doesn't.

It makes perfect sense to have a player roll because they know Zariel was once an angel who fell to corruption, but their character might not.

It makes less sense to have a Ranger or Druid who specializes in the Tundra to roll to know about Winter Wolves. It makes perfect sense that they would, even if there can be debate about the issue.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Maybe get rid of the emergencies part and have healing be out of combat only. It would certainly fit a lot of fiction. Add to that scaled healing based on the recipient and you've got yourself a system I would support.

While I would not in principle have a problem with that game. I would not play a game of D&D that way. Not a class based leveling game, I do not want my 15th level character to die in an alley from an alpha strike from some random mook.
If I want to play that game I can always play Warhammer.

 

[Chaosmancer]

What. So we have to call someone on metagaming .... through IC actions? That's some uno reversal shinanigans right there.

Not quite, but it is the fundamental problem with decrying metagaming.

There was a game I was in at a convention once, where the GM had created a bunch of puzzles. Each puzzle had had a symbol next to them, and the final puzzle was a code made of those symbols. We solved it on the first try. The GM was stunned, and asked how we had done it. We were confused, because the code was literally the order we had seen them in, right?

Turns out it wasn't, we had just written them down in the wrong order.... which happened to be the exact order of the code. Pure, unadulterated coincidence. But the thing is, this sort of stuff happens. I tend to be quite good at guessing plot twists that GMs out into the story. Is it because I'm metagaming? Not really, I'm just deeply immersed in fantasy tropes so I spot them. You could say that is meta-gaming, because fantasy tropes aren't part of the world, but I would literally have to change the way I think and interact to "avoid cheating"

Which would mean I would have to know what the twist is, realize I know it "for the wrong reasons" and then intentionally metagame to come to the wrong conclusion. But not only is that far too much effort, but it makes the mistake of assuming that meta-gaming is always bad. We meta-game all the time with things like "why is this group of strangers working together for another job after the first?"

People can take incomplete information and come to a conclusion, that conclusion can be correct or it can be incorrect. And if it is incorrect, then no one cares. It is only when it is correct that people start accusing them of cheating. Which, to avoid, a lot of players will INTENTIONALLY choose the incorrect guess. Which is also metagaming.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Not quite, but it is the fundamental problem with decrying metagaming.

There was a game I was in at a convention once, where the GM had created a bunch of puzzles. Each puzzle had had a symbol next to them, and the final puzzle was a code made of those symbols. We solved it on the first try. The GM was stunned, and asked how we had done it. We were confused, because the code was literally the order we had seen them in, right?

Turns out it wasn't, we had just written them down in the wrong order.... which happened to be the exact order of the code. Pure, unadulterated coincidence. But the thing is, this sort of stuff happens. I tend to be quite good at guessing plot twists that GMs out into the story. Is it because I'm metagaming? Not really, I'm just deeply immersed in fantasy tropes so I spot them. You could say that is meta-gaming, because fantasy tropes aren't part of the world, but I would literally have to change the way I think and interact to "avoid cheating"

Which would mean I would have to know what the twist is, realize I know it "for the wrong reasons" and then intentionally metagame to come to the wrong conclusion. But not only is that far too much effort, but it makes the mistake of assuming that meta-gaming is always bad. We meta-game all the time with things like "why is this group of strangers working together for another job after the first?"

People can take incomplete information and come to a conclusion, that conclusion can be correct or it can be incorrect. And if it is incorrect, then no one cares. It is only when it is correct that people start accusing them of cheating. Which, to avoid, a lot of players will INTENTIONALLY choose the incorrect guess. Which is also metagaming.

This kind of reminds me of one of the underlying things in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where the shows premise is a subvertion of the horror trope of the blonde airhead getting murdered in the alley at the start of the movie.

D&D players as a group now adays are so steeped in genre tropes that genre savviness and trope knowledge permeated our play and we do not notice half of it.

 

[Micah Sweet]

While I would not in principle have a problem with that game. I would not play a game of D&D that way. Not a class based leveling game, I do not want my 15th level character to die in an alley from an alpha strike from some random mook.
If I want to play that game I can always play Warhammer.

I'm actually cool with in-combat stabilization, but no positive hit points. If you're down, you're down.

 

[Chaosmancer]

A simple buff to healing is, not on its own, sufficient. The front-line fighters will always go down first as that it their job, to tank the fight (leaving aside considerations of damage dealing for now).
If healing in combat is simply buffed, then there is a very strong incentive for the DM to up the difficulty of the combat to maintain tension in the fight and the penalty falls on the front-line fighters.
You need healing to be effective in the combat rather than other actions the healer might do, and I think that the limitation on daily healing should be on the character being healed.
That was the nice thing about healing surges. The amount healed scaled with the initial hit points of the character not the spell that was cast. The number of surges frames the daily limit of the characters not the power/spell recharge limits of the casters.
You might need damage rider effects on healing magic to make the action economy work or bonus action healing might do it.

Healing surges worked really well, but part of that was they also were significant healing. 25% of the character's max hp. I agree that they worked incredibly within their system for keeping the resource in who was being healed, which makes narrative sense

I don't think just giving more healing will cause DMs to just increase the damage, that feels counter-intuitive to me, if they were the ones increasing the healing in the first place.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Healing surges worked really well, but part of that was they also were significant healing. 25% of the character's max hp. I agree that they worked incredibly within their system for keeping the resource in who was being healed, which makes narrative sense

I don't think just giving more healing will cause DMs to just increase the damage, that feels counter-intuitive to me, if they were the ones increasing the healing in the first place.

If WotC increases the healing though, not the DM, that's a different story.