D&D General 4e Healing was the best D&D healing

[Minigiant]

Or using the optional rules for long rests in the DMG like I do. I think 5E is far more flexible than 4E and doesn't require a ton of house rules to change the tone and pace.

That's it really.

4e healing surges is a better system for a basic fantasy adventure that happens over a day with meaningful tactically encounters within it.

5e hit dice is a worse base system but you can easily adjust it to fit a decent freeform, daily, hourly, weekly, biweekly, monthly, or encounter based system to your liking.

 

[Olrox17]

There are so many mechanical aspects of 4E that really make it the superior game to me. It's sad that there's something about the simulationist aspects of 3E/5E that make them generally more widely liked systems.

I've been running a 5E game, and every time I design encounters I get sad and miss 4E.

I wish I could marry 5Es character presentation to 4Es mechanics and monsters, but every time I sit down to do a rewrite, I get lost.

Couldn’t agree more, I know that feeling. Having to reinvent the wheel every time just to accomplish something that took 5 minutes to do in 4e.

 

[Fanaelialae]

That's it really.

4e healing surges is a better system for a basic fantasy adventure that happens over a day with meaningful tactically encounters within it.

5e hit dice is a worse base system but you can easily adjust it to fit a decent freeform, daily, hourly, weekly, biweekly, monthly, or encounter based system to your liking.

I disagree that 4e was less flexible in this respect. They just never published official rules for varying pacing in 4e (iirc).

For example, if you wanted to stretch the concept of an adventure day in 4e, you could simply redefine a long rest as requiring a week of rest, unless resting in a safe location. Then you can do attrition based adventures spread over several days.

The only thing you couldn't easily do was to safely cram more encounters into an adventure "day" than the system advised.

 

[Viking Bastard]

I want to say that despite how much I liked the elegancy of 4e's surges and how it plugged into the overall system, I also do quite like HD. Rolling HD is a big win among my players.

I don't have to do very much to recapture the aspects of the rythm I liked in 4e. I increase monster damage a bit and open up HD spending and I've got pretty much what I want.

 

[Minigiant]

I disagree that 4e was less flexible in this respect. They just never published official rules for varying pacing in 4e (iirc).

For example, if you wanted to stretch the concept of an adventure day in 4e, you could simply redefine a long rest as requiring a week of rest, unless resting in a safe location. Then you can do attrition based adventures spread over several days.

The only thing you couldn't easily do was to safely cram more encounters into an adventure "day" than the system advised.

yes and no.

Yes, 4e is technically as flexible.
but
4e has so many fiddy internal part and mathematical assumptions. Without the designers or DMs doing some hard works, it would be easy to not reach your intended goal.

Changing how surges recharge is a bigger deal than changing how HD recharge. A surge is 1/4 your health and a % of an enemy's attack damage gauged for the whole "adventure".

5e HD are flexible because they make no sense and the math is off. You'd trained to not care because it's already off anyway.

 

[MichaelSomething]

Well, obviously enough people liked them, but for precisely the reason you conclude with, I wouldn't. It makes no sense to me that being healed should be a daily resource. I'm glad that game was a lot of fun for people (especially if the balance was that good), but I would not have liked it.

Also, if clerical spells provide healing as well without using a healing surge, that is even more hp during the 4-encounter "day" (which I also wouldn't get on board with) design.

But, I appreciate the write-up and it helps me be even more certain my vote to the OP would be "disagree." Thanks!

What's your feelings on playing a healbot? Or on the Wand of Cure Light Wounds?

 

[Undrave]

There are so many mechanical aspects of 4E that really make it the superior game to me. It's sad that there's something about the simulationist aspects of 3E/5E that make them generally more widely liked systems.

I've been running a 5E game, and every time I design encounters I get sad and miss 4E.

I wish I could marry 5Es character presentation to 4Es mechanics and monsters, but every time I sit down to do a rewrite, I get lost.

Some 4e concepts and ideas really could have use refinement because they were on the right track for a lot of things. I feel like 4e Monsters were a lot of fun, regardless of the HP bloat issues.

A lot of things were walked back just so they could assure all the folks who lost their naughty word that it WASN'T like 4e.

Rolling HD is a big win among my players.

Let me guess... they also roll for HP at level up and prefer to roll for stats instead of using point buys or standard array?

Maybe you should have them roll for movement like in Hero Quest, I bet they'd like that too

 

[Fanaelialae]

yes and no.

Yes, 4e is technically as flexible.
but
4e has so many fiddy internal part and mathematical assumptions. Without the designers or DMs doing some hard works, it would be easy to not reach your intended goal.

Changing how surges recharge is a bigger deal than changing how HD recharge. A surge is 1/4 your health and a % of an enemy's attack damage gauged for the whole "adventure".

5e HD are flexible because they make no sense and the math is off. You'd trained to not care because it's already off anyway.

I'd agree with yes and no. 4e was more precisely engineered, so altering it without consideration could most certainly cause issues. That said, it was a fairly transparent edition with regard to design, so as long as you took the time to actually read the game it wasn't too difficult to mod.

5e went with a looser design that is ultimately more flexible, yes.

That said, I think that altering the duration of a long rest is fundamentally just as easy in either system. You're just changing the length of the adventuring day. 13th Age, which draws heavily from 4e, simply made their recovery system based off of how many encounters you've faced (decoupled from how much time has actually passed).

 

[billd91]

It's also a good idea to consider the reason for the healing surge mechanic: the ubiquitous use of wands of cure light wounds in 3e. In 3e, it was assumed that you could easily acquire or create magic items if you had the gold, and a wand of cure light wounds was dirt cheap: 750 gp for 50 charges that each healed 1d8+1 hp (as a comparison, a 4-person party was expected to find a total of 4,000 gp worth of treasure before level 2, and 77,000 gp fron level 10 to 11). 3e was balanced around the assumption that a party would have about 4 encounters per day, with each encounter being relatively easy on its own but sapping some resources in the form of hit points and spells expended, so by the time you got to the fourth encounter you actually had some danger. But the healing stick broke that, because it made it easy to bring everyone back to full hp between fights.

The wand of cure light wounds was a problem (as were wands of various utility spells that enabled the wizard to step all over roguish toes). But my take on it wasn't that healing was problematic - my conclusion is that the wand rules were problematic. This is one of the premiere problems with the 3e family - the magic item creation/purchase rules. They're way too commodified and it changed (I'd go so far as to say warped) the way a lot of people approached and played the game.

 

[prabe]

This is one of the premiere problems with the 3e family - the magic item creation/purchase rules. They're way too commodified and it changed (I'd go so far as to say warped) the way a lot of people approached and played the game.

I concur, whole-heartedly. The expectation that you will find magic items suitable for your character is ... troublesome. I don't mind there being some flexibility and some availability outside of treasure troves, but I also don't care for the idea that (for example) a STR-based character can reliably expect to find a set of gauntlets of ogre power by level 5 or so.