D&D (2024) The Problem with Healing Powercreep

[Emerikol]

Healing and crits are the two places I still don't understand why the 5e designers reinvented the wheel. They're also some of my best evidence that the designers either were afraid to be too much like 4e, disliked 4e and thus imitated it only with great reluctance, or (what I think is most likely of all) genuinely failed to understand how and why 4e mechanics worked and thus imitated only the surface, with predictable results.

I would have hated it though. They probably thought they could satisfy people like me with 5e's superficial approach. They got a lot of people to play the game so who is saying they didn't. They didn't solve the issue for me. I think 5e could have been a good game for me but healing is a major issue.

 

[Emerikol]

Well, in 4e it doesn't come up. You take a short rest, you spend surges, you regain hp. There's no game-play logic to not spending your surges.

Actually if you've been reading people have presented various reasons.

1. There is some healing that triggers off a surge and you need to do it in smaller increments to get the full effect.
2. There are other uses for surges beyond just healing.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

No offense but.... Those three words unction as the same linguistic shield from criticism and responsibility for the words that follow as ttrpg equivalents like:
"It's what my character would do" along with"I'm a roleplayer and..."

I almost never see them used for any other purposes

The only case I have ever heard those words used with sincerity IRL, rather than as an excuse to be mean, is when someone is asking for frank, unfiltered criticism of their work and it's genuinely crap. That's just about the only situation where it's fine, and that's because you have been asked for frank criticism and thus you have to be willing to accept that the criticism might make you upset.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Actually if you've been reading people have presented various reasons.

1. There is some healing that triggers off a surge and you need to do it in smaller increments to get the full effect.
2. There are other uses for surges beyond just healing.

Keep in mind the original context of the discussion though. The original response was talking about a situation where you pretty much always spend surges anytime you get the chance to, unless:

(a) you are already (sufficiently close to) full health, or
(b) you're out and thus don't get the choice in the first place.

The conditions for wanting to hold onto a healing surge when you would get the full benefit of using one are slim. They exist; there are mechanics where it might be wise to hold onto one or two for an emergency. But in practice? Easily 95% of the time, if you are missing more hit points than your surge value and you take a short rest (=5 minute breather), you're spending one of your surges.

It is fully intended that most characters should be burning through all or nearly all of their healing surges every adventuring day. Heck, it's technically intended that you might burn through MORE than your limit, because every milestone (=2 encounters), you'd get back one surge amongst other nice things, which could be a tempting carrot to get a group to push onward, rather than exclusively using "time pressure" aka punishments for resting too often.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I would have hated it though. They probably thought they could satisfy people like me with 5e's superficial approach. They got a lot of people to play the game so who is saying they didn't. They didn't solve the issue for me. I think 5e could have been a good game for me but healing is a major issue.

So, there's a pair of important facts that I think explains both of these things handily, but the two often get misconstrued.

The first fact is that players and DMs often do not know what they actually want and why they actually want it. This is not unique to D&D, it's a common problem in many things. Food, for example, is full of received wisdom about what one "should" want, rather than being driven by what actually produces better outcomes. The discovery that people wanted Extra Chunky spaghetti sauce is an example there. Now, this absolutely cannot be used as a "your opinion is invalid" card--but it's worth remembering that it is quite possible to believe very strongly that some particular thing is necessary, only to later realize that you don't enjoy it as much as you believed you would.

The second fact is that it is often difficult, even for experienced players and DMs, to foresee the consequences of a set of rules before engaging with them. Rules are abstract things, by definition, and abstractions are harder to work with than concrete things. A rule may result in a particular consequence just like the rules of gravity result in a ball rolling down a hill, but without that visual intuition to guide us, it can be hard to see the consequences. No one is totally immune to this.

One of the key ways these two facts often get misconstrued when combined is to say that rules don't matter. If you can't tell what they'll do before you use them, and you can't be sure that rules that sound good are actually rules that work good, some conclude that that means all rules are equally bad, so bin 'em and just do whatever. This is, of course, the death of game design (and, indeed, the death of all creative media.)

What it actually means is that rules design is difficult, and self-understanding is difficult, but that there are ways we can do better or worse, and (perhaps most importantly of all), we can learn ways to better understand the impact of rules before they're used, and ways to make rules that do better at achieving the goals for which they were designed. (All rules humans make are, necessarily, designed for some purpose, though some purposes are better or more achievable than others.)

 

[Micah Sweet]

The character's point of view IS a story element they want to emphasize...


I genuinely don't understand how that is possible. You want to evince what that character's personality, knowledge, values, etc. would produce. You chose that personality. Doing so IS choosing what story you want to tell!

I simply don't see it that way, and in fact feel that seeing it like that is off-putting. When I decide what I'm going to do with my day in real life, I don't think about my story. Why would my PC be any different?

 

[Emerikol]

Keep in mind the original context of the discussion though. The original response was talking about a situation where you pretty much always spend surges anytime you get the chance to, unless:

(a) you are already (sufficiently close to) full health, or
(b) you're out and thus don't get the choice in the first place.

The conditions for wanting to hold onto a healing surge when you would get the full benefit of using one are slim. They exist; there are mechanics where it might be wise to hold onto one or two for an emergency. But in practice? Easily 95% of the time, if you are missing more hit points than your surge value and you take a short rest (=5 minute breather), you're spending one of your surges.

It is fully intended that most characters should be burning through all or nearly all of their healing surges every adventuring day. Heck, it's technically intended that you might burn through MORE than your limit, because every milestone (=2 encounters), you'd get back one surge amongst other nice things, which could be a tempting carrot to get a group to push onward, rather than exclusively using "time pressure" aka punishments for resting too often.

The criticism though holds even if most of the time you would use the surge. The player making that decision is not making it as the character. In fact, even if it is absolutely never used any other way, it is still a player decision that gets made and something the character would likely know nothing about.

 

[tetrasodium]

The only case I have ever heard those words used with sincerity IRL, rather than as an excuse to be mean, is when someone is asking for frank, unfiltered criticism of their work and it's genuinely crap. That's just about the only situation where it's fine, and that's because you have been asked for frank criticism and thus you have to be willing to accept that the criticism might make you upset.

Malice has nothing to do with it and there is a line where being "frank" crosses into being rude offensive or just being a jerk. When a player feels the need to say "It'sWhatMyCharacterWouldDo", it's almost always because the person saying it just chose to do something everyone knows is unreasonable behavior. The phrase shifts the criticism from the fact that Bob is being a jerk over to if Bob's character would do it & why not with the burden of proof shifted from bob to those calling it out.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Malice has nothing to do with it and there is a line where being "frank" crosses into being rude offensive or just being a jerk. When a player feels the need to say "It'sWhatMyCharacterWouldDo", it's almost always because the person saying it just chose to do something everyone knows is unreasonable behavior. The phrase shifts the criticism from the fact that Bob is being a jerk over to if Bob's character would do it & why not with the burden of proof shifted from bob to those calling it out.

Sure. I was simply making a comment on the "no offense but..." example, for a place where those words might occur in earnest, rather than as an excuse. As with "It's what my character would do!", the vast majority of uses are excuses and dodges, exactly as you describe.

 

[Vaalingrade]

The criticism though holds even if most of the time you would use the surge. The player making that decision is not making it as the character. In fact, even if it is absolutely never used any other way, it is still a player decision that gets made and something the character would likely know nothing about.

How do you assign ASIs on level up?

Or all of the other non diegetic things that come up because we're playing a game and that's how playing a game works?

I know, something something actor stance vs horse stance vs tough on grime stance or whatever, but sometimes a game has to be a game.