D&D 5E 2/18/13 L&L column

[Dire Human]

You have to die easily, suffer and catch gangrene and lose limbs, like a good victim of Fantasy Vietnam where hit points are meat chunks being cut away with every stroke.

At what level do you get Dispel Agent Orange?

 

[FireLance]

Not having healing is a deal breaker for me. It has to be balanced around healing if there is ever going to be healing because the basic damage output determines it. If you don't balance it round healing, you are going to get a game that has zero danger.

Not quite. Setting aside the extreme (and IMO, rather unrealistic) case where there is not even natural healing, a game without healing simply means that the players ought to be more careful when deciding whether to press on or to retreat and rest.

 

[Danzauker]

Like combat ans skills, every character needs healing. It's a transversal need. No class should be mandatory.

If you don't have a rogue, you can design dungeons without traps. Not common but perfectly feasible. The DM can just add more monsters. If you don't have a fighter or a wizard, the DM only need to tailor the kinds and number of monsters to the party.

And those are extreme cases. In "modern" D&D every class is somewhat proficient in whacking enemies and using skills.

But you can't avoid characters to get whacked, so if healing is 90% province of the cleric like in old D&D, then I'ts a serious case of bad design and grognard *** kissings, and it's the biggest obstacle to buying 5E I've met so far.

I'm starting to think that healing should be a well defined and balanced system - outside of class features.

Let's imagine we have a system for "natural healing", which represent a reasonable "real" and down to earth approach at getting better, and a "supernatural" healing that basically could be based on the natural ones with most of the limitations and bottlenecks removed.

So, Cure Minor Wounds, Cure Major Wounds, Cure Critical Wounds and all the rest, would be well defined "effects" of the healing system, not spells.

The trick is giving ways to EVERY class to "buy in" supernatural healing. Through feats, feature swapping, spells that reproduce one of the "healing effects", backgrounds, specialties, kits, whatever, I don't know.

This way EVERY character could be a healer and a LOT more fantasy and action healer archetypes could be represented. And the "source" of the healing power beomes more of a fluff issue than a mechanical one.

Wanna be a Harry Potter style wizard that can cast healing spells? You can. Want to be a master Miyagi monk that can lay on hands and get you back after a serious leg injury? You can. Want to be a ranger that can heal thanks to his herbalism knowledge? You can. Want to be a fighter that has so strong a willpower that can literally shout his injured companions back on feet? You can.

It's all a matter of the gaming group playing style and preferred fantasy setting to allow or disallow one of these choices.

I'm ok with the basic game to present a "default" cleric that has healing altready fully built in and no other class has.

But I'd be ABSOLUTELY disappointed if the standard game does not allow other ways to heal other than be a cleric or multiclassing into a cleric, except for a side note optional rule.

The evolution of D&D in the last 15 years has proven (we would't be arguing about this every day, if it weren't) that the fan base is quite divided in the issue. The standard game MUST support both styles of play. and both MUST be first class citisens for the game to be successful.

In MHO the solutions should be to design the system before, then find a vay to deliver it to every class, like I tried to explin before, but, then, I'm no game designer, so I let the professionals do the hard work.

 

[FireLance]

every character needs healing.

This is a fundamental assumption that I would like to question. Why should it be necessary for any character to have access to healing apart from natural healing? To me, the simple consequence is that any time the healing spells or heaing potions would be used, the character(s) simply retreat and rest instead.

Would anyone care to weigh in?

 

[Chris_Nightwing]

I'd like to highlight an issue that will arise as a result of clerical healing, via spells, in the basic game.

Clerics get various spell slots. In order for healing to work in the basic game, I imagine we will see Cure Light, Moderate, Serious, Critical Wounds, Heal and so forth. These restore a large number of hit points. They will likely be the best pick for a given spell level. Let's say we advance to the standard game and throw in non-magical healing of some form. How will it compare to the power of the Cleric? Either it will pale in comparison (technically the hit dice in the playtest are already weaker than a Cleric in full-heal mode) or be buffed up to some sort of equality. The healing available will be included in the math behind HP and damage and the adventuring day - a Cleric in the party just increases your healing by 1/4 or 1/5. Wow, that's quite a bit right? Plus, can any mundane healing compare to Heal? You ought to prepare that my Clerical friend - it's the best spell of that level.

And so we return to a land of Clerics having to prepare heals, because they are still the most powerful option they have. Since we have a generic spell list, there can be no excuse, I'm sorry my good friend who worships the God of the Sea, healing is more important than thematic spell choices for you.

Hyperbole? Perhaps, but I find it very unlikely that the standard game will change or limit cure spells for Clerics, because they need them in the basic game. Perhaps there will be a 2E sphere system - hm but my memory of that was contriving a god who gave you at least minor access to healing, because it was so good. Perhaps you'll have the option to ban magical healing, only that then gives little scope for the specialised Cleric of a god of healing.

Damn it, I don't want all Clerics healing, and I don't want those that do swinging to 100% healing over anything else. I want it to enhance the party thematically, not create a HP battery. So many changes will be required from a basic game that has all Clerics healing very effectively that I don't think standard will support this.

Incidentally, my first ever character, as a newbie, was a Cleric I was forced to play. I wanted to be a hammer-wielding Fighter, so I got to play a less effective version of that who spent 90% of his spell preparation on healing, rather than awesome spells befitting the god of thunder, because I realised quickly that restoring 1d8 HP was superior to anything else I could do given the HP/damage paradigm of 2E. No, it didn't put me off the game, but I won't play a bloody Cleric again until they can avoid this fate.

 

[pemerton]

it's the experienced players PROJECTING their feelings of playing an AD&D cleric onto these imaginary "newbie players" and thus demanding the Basic game should have options.

Isn't there an argument, though, that the projection is justified? I mean, expecting the sun to rise tomorrow (and induction more generally) can be analysed as a species of projection, but that's not to say it's irrational!

In this particular case, if the experiences of experienced players have revealed, more-or-less-reliably, that the cleric is a distinctively un-fun role for many players, why build it in as obligatory?

Of course, there is also [MENTION=2067]Kamikaze Midget[/MENTION]'s argument that the current rules let you find traps without a rogue (INT check or whatever), let you do damage without the fighter (cast a spell) and let you sneak around and/or bullly people without an MU (DEX or CHA check as appropriate). Where is the ability to use a stat check to mitigate damage, or to restore it once lost? (I think a new player might find it pretty intuitive, once told their PC has been hit, to say "But I dodge!")

But even if KM's argument is put to one side, the experience of experienced players tells them that for many players the cleric is distinctively unfun to play.

But everything Kamikaze is saying hinges on the fact that all these random new players are being assigned the cleric to play, and unless the Basic includes more than just the magical Cure Wounds spells... then all these new players are going to be forced to do nothing but heal the other players. Apparently the idea that the new player who has the cleric might choose to use different spells doesn't count, because they're going to get browbeaten into only taking Cure Wounds. And thus, the only way to protect these poor mindless new D&D players who can't think for themselves and are going to be tricked into taking on this class and role that no one else wants to play, is to throw a whole bunch of alternate options into the Basic game... rather than just relying on the Standard game to present those rules for them.

This is not how I read KM. I took him to be saying two things:

(1) The Basic game should have elements for damage mitigation/restoration other than Cure Wounds spells (dodging/parrying being one obvious one - second wind of some sort being another pretty obvious one, I would say).

(2) That the newbie player of a cleric won't have to be bullied into taking heal spells, because a quick read of the class description, and review of the class spell list, will make it evident that healing is expected to be a major part of what a cleric does.

I am curious as to what you mean by "get around having a cleric".

In my ideal game, the specific composition of the party should not matter most of the time.

For example, if a party composed of a fighter, a rogue, a monk and a wizard and another party composed of a fighter, a rogue, a cleric and a wizard were to undertake the same generic adventure and fight the same generic encounters, they each ought to have to rest at approximately the same time.

To the best of my understanding (and given his comments upthread both that "adventuring without a cleric should be possible" and "tackling a vampire-hunt without a cleric should be harder"), [MENTION=85555]Bedrockgames[/MENTION] is working with a more general and abstract conception of "the adventure" than you are: if you have a cleric, your adventure will include the experience of turning undead, frequent magical healing; if you have a fighter instead, your adventure will inclue the experience of more swords being swung but also more running away from wights; if you have a thief instead then your adventure will have more sneaking and less fighting; etc.

On this picture, "encounters" aren't the constituent elements of an adventure; the adventure consists (perhaps) of a goal or endpoint (defeating Strahd, perhaps, or looting the dragon's horde), but it is expected that the path to this endpoint, resources consumed along the way, etc, will vary radically across group compositions.

I've had a lot of dislike for 4E for a variety of reasons, but even though I abhorred the actual implementation I thought that removing healing from being a clerical burden was a smart and LONG-needed change.

<snip>

Divorcing hit point recovery from clerics with all that that entails opens up FAR more dynamic and interesting possibilities for them as a class. Most importantly it eliminates unneeded and unwanted pressure that ONE player must play a particular class whether he wants to or not.

<snip>

It doesn't matter necessarily if the source of hit point recovery is magical or not. What IS important is that it not be so heavily burdensome to ONE CHARACTER in the party to be the all-important source of it. It ought to instead be spread around to as many potential sources as possible. Wizards should be able to cast arcane spells to repair bodies. Clerics could conduct daily rituals in which others could participate for the gods to lend them assistance. Fighters might have their own ability to simply come to grips with the pain or demonstrate that it just wasn't as bad a wound as it looked to be at first. Fantasy worlds should be full of all manner of herbs and minerals to heal this or that particular ill. Why not a freakin' rabbits foot or 4-leaf clover lucky charm that's good for x amount of hit points a day?

There are a dozen ways to "heal" physical damage. There are dozens more that can simply replenish hit points. Don't call it all HEALING. Call it what it once was - part luck, part divine favor, some skill, and of course fatigue.

For my part, I agree with the stuff after the first paragraph and find it (or most of it - still not much wizardly healing) in 4e. (Though it is all called "healing" - a technical counterpart to "damage", and both a bit misleading given their ordinary English meanings.) It's a pity that implementation plus other features meant you couldn't enjoy those benefits! - maybe D&Dnext will manage to have this sort of stuff in a way that suits you.

 

[Danzauker]

This is a fundamental assumption that I would like to question. Why should it be necessary for any character to have access to healing apart from natural healing? To me, the simple consequence is that any time the healing spells or heaing potions would be used, the character(s) simply retreat and rest instead.

Would anyone care to weigh in?

If you want anything that at least resembles "natural" healing, then you'd need weeks or months to recover from a fight gone bad. Unless you set for a "after one night, all XPs are back" style a la 4E, which is what many people do not like, of course, but that's hardly realistic.

In all other cases you need some sort of "supernatural" healing, unless you want a really really gritty game or a completely different damage tracking system from HPs.

 

[pemerton]

This is a fundamental assumption that I would like to question. Why should it be necessary for any character to have access to healing apart from natural healing? To me, the simple consequence is that any time the healing spells or heaing potions would be used, the character(s) simply retreat and rest instead.

Would anyone care to weigh in?

Doesn't this depend a bit on how the combat system is balanced? - eg in 4e, if you can't unlock healing surges during combat you are pretty hosed, and will probably be cut down as you retreat.

It also depends a bit on how retreat and rest are handled at the strategic level (eg in some RPGs such as Marvel Heroic, the GM's ability to throw threats at the PCs while they are resting during "transition scenes" is limited; but historically this has not been the case in D&D).

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And on a mostly unrelated note, what the hell is in a healing kit? It's dirt cheap, has 20 uses, and with a 10 minute rest I can use it to restore multiple dice plus CON of hit points - as much or more than a Cure Wounds spell!

Consider: with Cure Critical Wounds (a 4th level spell), a 7th level cleric heals 4d8+8 hp once per day; whereas once per day a 12 CON 7th level fighter, with no more than one-tenth of a single use of a healing kit (ie 1/200th of the total value, 2.5 cp worth), can restore 7d10+7 hp - that must be a pretty serious wound healed with no more bandage and unguent than you might barter for a couple of sacks!

I don't see how this can be the salve for the "unreality" of inspirational healing or 4e's extended rests.

 

[FireLance]

To the best of my understanding (and given his comments upthread both that "adventuring without a cleric should be possible" and "tackling a vampire-hunt without a cleric should be harder"), [MENTION=85555]Bedrockgames[/MENTION] is working with a more general and abstract conception of "the adventure" than you are: if you have a cleric, your adventure will include the experience of turning undead, frequent magical healing; if you have a fighter instead, your adventure will inclue the experience of more swords being swung but also more running away from wights; if you have a thief instead then your adventure will have more sneaking and less fighting; etc.

On this picture, "encounters" aren't the constituent elements of an adventure; the adventure consists (perhaps) of a goal or endpoint (defeating Strahd, perhaps, or looting the dragon's horde), but it is expected that the path to this endpoint, resources consumed along the way, etc, will vary radically across group compositions.

If that is indeed the case, there is no need to "get around having a cleric" because there is nothing to get around - it's just a matter of different experiences.

I doubt it is the case, though, as the remark was made in the context of damage mitigation abilities as a substitute for clerical healing.

 

[pemerton]

I doubt it is the case, though, as the remark was made in the context of damage mitigation abilities as a substitute for clerical healing.

I can see why you say that - but as best I follow it the concern with damage mitigation is that it will make the experiences too similar when they are meant to be different.

(From the 4e point of view they obviously wouldn't be too similar - there is obviously a big difference in the mechanical resolution, and the consequent thrills, pacing etc of damage mitigation compared to healing. But I think those sorts of experiences, which can be big at the table but are small in the fiction (because occupying only a few seconds of fictional time) aren't the sorts of differences Bedrockgames is looking for.)