D&D (2024) The Problem with Healing Powercreep

[Daztur]

Because it is hella easier to get more encounters between long rests that way. It is hard to have narrative consequences for resting for a day; it is way easier to have them for resting for a week, especially with an additional requirement of a safe haven. Then long rest basically become "abandon mission" if you have not accomplished your goals before you take it.

For me my most successful games of 5e as both a player and a DM have been "you're on a boat!" games (pirates, Greek Myth, and Star Wars) as "no long resting except in a friendly port" ended up feeling more natural than a week's rest and it made it feel more natural to swap players in and out depending on who showed up that session when people were in the middle of an "adventuring day" as you could always have whoever didn't show up "be below decks, doing stuff."

But yeah, the Five Minute Adventuring Day is something that DMs have to learn to avoid, especially in 3e and 5e.

That's an issue because ... why? I've been using the optional rules for years, it works well for my preferred pacing.

Yes, that's what I was saying. It's still an attritional challenge, just extended over more than one session and more than one in-game day. I'd rather be able to get through an entire attritional challenge in a single session due to various real-world logistical issues but that's hard to do in 5e and will be harder in 5.5e.

I have no issue with the change, for the most part in combat healing for anything other than bringing someone back from 0 is, for the most part, a waste of time following the 2014 rules. It's why drinking a healing potion as a bonus action is so popular.

Yes, the change makes tactical combat better but at the cost of making strategic resource management drag even more than in 5e. Takes too much real world time to attrition down 5e PCs and will take longer in 5.5e.

I have a group that doesn't have a healer other than a Way of Mercy monk in case someone drops to 0. On the other hand they do burn through a lot of healing potions because I don't back off on difficulty.

But one of the things I liked about 4E is that my cleric felt like they could be more than just a healbot, they could be decent at support and heal when needed. While I don't want to go back to that, I still see people feeling like someone "has to" play a cleric with the 2014 rules. We'll see how well it works in practice when we actually start playing.

Yes, I like how having a dedicated healer (or a fistful of CLW wands) isn't as utterly essential in 5e as it was in 3.*e, but I feel that this Cure Wounds buff undermines that.

I think whether it’s a problem comes down to the play style that you mentioned. For me and my friends when I was playing 2e, we noticed that:

1) We always needed a cleric.
2) Playing the cleric felt like drawing the short straw because you were the healer - you couldn’t do your cool spells because you needed to hold healing in reserve.
3) Our style of play was already trending away from dungeon exploring and attrition to more heroic play. If we were caught in a place where we had expended our resources, we’d beat feet back to town unscathed, rest however long that took, and picked up where we left off. Fighting for your survival while in retreat was a one-off thing - repeatedly doing it felt like a deficiency in the game to us.

So come 5e, and with a different set of players but still the same emphasis on heroic play, the change became “make it to the next rest and skip the healing because what’s the point?” I almost feel like the game the way we play it could abandon healing spells altogether and make it all about short and long rests but that’d probably be too much of a sacred cow.

Yeah, all of that can be annoying for exactly the reasons you touched on. I really like 4e healing surges as a solution to that...except for how 4e gave people WAY too many healing surges. Healing should be more of a precious resource, not such a deep well that you can refill your PCs HPs from death's door multiple times over in a single day, that just makes it take too damn long to drain off a PC's resources.

 

[evilbob]

My preferred play-style of D&D is [X] ...
You can still approach things in this way in 5e but it’s harder.

I don't mean to be reductive, but I feel like this is the crux of your argument. Which is a completely fair point! But it's also subjective.

Counterpoint: I like that healing is getting buffed because it allows for a different style of play: where people who enjoy support roles can feel like they made a direct, impactful difference in battle.

Another counterpoint: my personal opinion is that historically, the combat pillar is given too much weight by every facet of D&D: the rules, the playtime, the focus, the maths. I also personally do not enjoy a slow, grinding slog through long dungeons where resource management is king (but I do not judge people who do!). I suspect, based on how video games have evolved (which I only use as a comparison since so many of them steal from D&D and they iterate faster), that this style has become less common; battles have become more like flashpoints, while exploration and role-play have been given more weight. Your original point - please correct me if I'm wrong - is that healing buffs tend to emphasize having fewer battles and downplay resource management. I agree! But I think this trend is following what is generally becoming more popular, and perhaps more expected. I think this is a good thing, because I think less experienced players will expect D&D to work this way; it may be more intuitive to them. And I think more experienced players - such as ourselves - have greater tools in their tool belt for correcting the core tenants of the game to make it more like the style we enjoy.

 

[tetrasodium]

Because it is hella easier to get more encounters between long rests that way. It is hard to have narrative consequences for resting for a day; it is way easier to have them for resting for a week, especially with an additional requirement of a safe haven. Then long rest basically become "abandon mission" if you have not accomplished your goals before you take it.

While this is all true, it still carries the cognitive dissonance I mentioned & there's a problem in it that I'll get to below on it's own. The 5e ruleset was designed at every level possible to ensure that the only consequences possible are narrative ones and the players have already decided to go whole hog on 5mwd "rest>nova>repeat" type play... "Abandon mission"? So what? Think about where that goes and pretty quickly you run into a fork leading to the things like either A:who cares if NPCs the players don't need anything from don't like them very much unless the gm takes on one of those labels noted above to make it matter with a hostile crap sack world --or-- B: the GM takes on one of those labels and just tosses all of their prep work for the session/adventure to pick up and try again with a whole new adventure for the players to "abandon mission" or nova>rest>repeat through next session because the players have already decided to go all in on that style of play.

As to this...

especially with an additional requirement of a safe haven.

we are talking about d&d 5e not a game like AIME or some secondary houserule added by a GM donning one of those labels. The fact that you needed to go beyond the dmg267 variant rest rules to make the point undercuts everything in it.

 

[Daztur]

I don't mean to be reductive, but I feel like this is the crux of your argument. Which is a completely fair point! But it's also subjective.

Of course.

My more objective issue is that 5e has both slow combat (relative to TSR-D&D) and doesn't work well unless you have a lot of encounters per long rest.

This means that often you can't end a session with a long rest which is a real pain for me for real world logistical concerns. If your player roster shifts every week because of real life it's soooooo convenient to end a session with a long rest.

Counterpoint: I like that healing is getting buffed because it allows for a different style of play: where people who enjoy support roles can feel like they made a direct, impactful difference in battle.

Agreed, which is why I think the "let Cure Wounds stay buffed but make it cost Hit Dice" is a good compromise between tactical and strategic concerns.

Another counterpoint: my personal opinion is that historically, the combat pillar is given too much weight by every facet of D&D: the rules, the playtime, the focus, the maths. I also personally do not enjoy a slow, grinding slog through long dungeons where resource management is king (but I do not judge people who do!

I also do not like slow grinds or a focus on combat, I like fast-paced hijinks, which is why I like combat that is fast to resolve.

I suspect, based on how video games have evolved (which I only use as a comparison since so many of them steal from D&D and they iterate faster), that this style has become less common; battles have become more like flashpoints, while exploration and role-play have been given more weight. Your original point - please correct me if I'm wrong - is that healing buffs tend to emphasize having fewer battles and downplay resource management.

Those are fine goals, but I don't see 5.5e hitting those goals. Having a whole slew of combat encounters per adventure is an assumption baked into the design in 5e and nothing in 5.5e moves away from that. To have a less combat focused game, D&D needs to be set up so that things work better with few fights, which seemed to be the case in the very first playtests of 5e.

 

[Micah Sweet]

On a more motivations-of-play note: I have been reading Peterson's new edition of Playing At the World and thinking about the way D&D was rooted in wargaming. Whereas I believe one observes in the latter part of the half-century arc an almost paradigmatic shift in motivations (away from wargaming). If so, then concern for wargamerish attritional challenge may be lessened as a priority for design.

It absolutely has been de-prioritized. I wish it hadn't been though, as like @Daztur it makes my preferred style of play less viable.

 

[TiQuinn]

Yeah, all of that can be annoying for exactly the reasons you touched on. I really like 4e healing surges as a solution to that...except for how 4e gave people WAY too many healing surges. Healing should be more of a precious resource, not such a deep well that you can refill your PCs HPs from death's door multiple times over in a single day, that just makes it take too damn long to drain off a PC's resources.

I may go back and look at that rule because 4e is the ruleset I’m the least familiar with.

The issue is a tough nut to crack, I definitely agree.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Well the issue here is that WotC may not care about wargamerish attritional challenge but wargamerish attritional challenge cares about them.

What I mean by that is that 5.*e is based around having six or so encounters per long rest and a lot of the game just doesn't work right if you only have 1-2, as that allows the players to go full nova during most every fight (which causes a lot of issues) and having few fights per long rest utterly screws over classes that can't nova well like rogues.

And if you're going to have 6 or so encounters per long rest it's pretty hard to set up anything BUT an attritional challenge. What other options are there?

WotC would probably be better off changing their assumptions and making the game work better if there are a lot fewer encounters per long rest but pretty hard to change that now without scrapping backwards compatibility.

Agreed. It would likely result in a game I don't want to play, but it would I think be a better game for what WotC wants to accomplish design-wise in the long run.

 

[evilbob]

My more objective issue is that 5e has both slow combat (relative to TSR-D&D) and doesn't work well unless you have a lot of encounters per long rest.

Having a whole slew of combat encounters per adventure is an assumption baked into the design in 5e and nothing in 5.5e moves away from that.

Definitely agree on 1, but I agree less on 2. I think that's one of the principles we're slowly seeing emerge. To be fair, we won't really know until the DMG and MM are released as well, though, so I may stand corrected.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I don't mean to be reductive, but I feel like this is the crux of your argument. Which is a completely fair point! But it's also subjective.

Counterpoint: I like that healing is getting buffed because it allows for a different style of play: where people who enjoy support roles can feel like they made a direct, impactful difference in battle.

Another counterpoint: my personal opinion is that historically, the combat pillar is given too much weight by every facet of D&D: the rules, the playtime, the focus, the maths. I also personally do not enjoy a slow, grinding slog through long dungeons where resource management is king (but I do not judge people who do!). I suspect, based on how video games have evolved (which I only use as a comparison since so many of them steal from D&D and they iterate faster), that this style has become less common; battles have become more like flashpoints, while exploration and role-play have been given more weight. Your original point - please correct me if I'm wrong - is that healing buffs tend to emphasize having fewer battles and downplay resource management. I agree! But I think this trend is following what is generally becoming more popular, and perhaps more expected. I think this is a good thing, because I think less experienced players will expect D&D to work this way; it may be more intuitive to them. And I think more experienced players - such as ourselves - have greater tools in their tool belt for correcting the core tenants of the game to make it more like the style we enjoy.

The video game that plays the most like how I like to run D&D is Darkest Dungeon. A buddy of mine introduced me to it a little while ago (I somehow missed it), and it is amazing? Very attrition and resource management-based.

 

[Shiroiken]

I think the healing powercreep is an extension of the change in the way the game is played. Combat in earlier editions was brutal, and could often be avoided or won before initiative was even rolled ("combat as war"). Modern gaming assumes combat is the default method for overcoming enemies, with encounters being balanced against the party's level and abilities ("combat as sport"). This requires there to be a lot more healing in the game, since combat will drain away HP and the game wants the party to win.