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

[doctorbadwolf]

Utility powers are rare, and encounter or at-will daily utilities were nearly unheard of.

Well that just isn't true. Maybe from the PHB? Certainly not even by the time PHB2 came out, IIRC. By the time themes came out (the later ones, not Dark Sun), this was really far from the case.

Yes and no. Even utility powers were mainly focused on combat (or at least tactical situations), with a few exceptions – the main thing about them was that they weren't attacks. They'd do things like mobility, defense, or healing.

IDK, I used them for exploration more than anything, as did most players I saw, and some classes had social interaction related powers, as well.

It's funny because I look at a statement like that and then I think back to the edition before 4e and think how much of an improvement roughly a third of your powers being utility powers was over 3.5 and how much less like a game built almost exclusively around combat 4e felt to me.

Yep. The Utility powers, rituals as wholly separate from spells, the way nearly every skill had some useage in either combat or surviving exploration so you never had to choose between combat and non-combat efficacy (whereas in 3 and 5, you see a lot of characters who don't take stuff like linguist, because the same resource could give them a giant boost to combat prowess), having so many feats that it never felt like a flavor feat was a big sacrifice, and a robust skill system that handled the more free flowing nature of interaction and exploration vastly better than any dnd before or since, etc.

The issue I had was that non-combat stuff was entirely pushed into fiddly skill usage

Skills were less fiddly, IMO, than combat stuff was, but...I mean, would you want non-combat to be built like combat? If so, why? I can't imagine enjoying that. I want completely different things from the two, and I hate having to choose between efficacy in fighting style and options like cool ritual spells, or knowledge skills, or feats like linguist and keen mind, when they don't serve the same basic kind of function.

 

[Fanaelialae]

If that sort of thing comes up often enough, then I can understand why Gygax's explanation might be unsatisfactory. Honestly, I doubt he believed half of the rationalizations he came up with. It's pretty clear that making a coherent model wasn't exactly his highest priority.

That doesn't mean that making sense of his work was futile, though. Over the decades, a significant portion of the player-base figured out how to run basically the same rules he'd put forth, with just enough house rulings to cover those areas that weren't addressed directly, such that we could actually take it seriously. Slow healing was one of the lynchpins in that operation, though. Without that, the whole thing falls apart.

From my perspective, slow healing is precisely what causes it to fall apart. Slow healing is only possible if every attack that deals damage results in physical injury.

It seems to me, that entails rationalizing how every attack, including an orcish greataxe or a giant swinging an oak tree, causes some small injury to the character, like a scratch or a bruise. I don't buy that leather armor +1 will spare you, even if you are just glanced by an oak being slammed down on you by a creature four times your size. Given the amount of kinetic energy involved, even a glancing blow ought to be serious or fatal. So we must assume that in this model, characters have superhuman toughness if such an attack is injurious.

Additionally, we somehow need to address why these superhuman individuals require weeks or even months to heal those bruises and scratches. In the real world, injuries typically heal in parallel rather than serially. However, slow healing is either serial (I heal this scratch today, and tomorrow I heal that scratch) or it requires that each new scratch causes all other scratches to heal more slowly. 1 scratch takes one day to heal, 2 scratches take two days to heal, and 60 scratches take sixty days to heal.

The more reasonable approach, to me, is that most attacks don't connect with the character (so long as they have hit points remaining). Obviously, attacks with an effect that require contact can be assumed to have made such contact. Hit points might represent some degree of physical resilience, but no more than we would expect of a tough soldier in our own world. Primarily though, they are more ephemeral factors (like the skill to dodge a deadly attack at the last second). Of course, in this context, slow healing makes no sense since hit points represent factors that you can recover readily, such as the fatigue caused by twisting out of the way of an otherwise lethal attack. "Injuries" such as visible bruises and scratches aren't even necessarily hit point loss, since these might not impede the character's performance in a meaningful way. Under this definition, loss of HP does not necessarily equate to physical harm.

YMMV

 

[Micah Sweet]

And that's not something that happened in 4e. I've played non-damaging characters in 4e. Every edition of D&D encourages players to seek out damage - but forcing everyone to maximise damage is a whole different story. 3.0's design decisions leading to wizards that actively worked round the hit point mechanic with save or suck spells were unintended design and the result of bad playtesting.

Indeed 4e opened up non-damaging options. First it was the first edition to have at will cantrips so there was something that e.g. pacifist clerics could do every round in combat (Astral Seal mostly); cantrips were limited before 4e. Second there's the warlord - even in the PHB you could contribute significantly to combat while never actually making an attack roll yourself or even using magic.

What it cut back on was party members who didn't contribute to combat, instead relying on everyone else to bail them out of a team situation. But minimising escort missions is not at all the same thing as forcing everyone to actively seek out damage.

To use a simple example in 3.5 at first level your wizard or cleric had three first level spells. The rest of the time what did they do in combat? Hide, cowering? Or did they try to do damage with weapons?



That's not something that happened in 4e either. The rules don't say you must - just they make it a good idea. There is nothing enforcing good tactics in any edition. Simply things guiding you towards good tactics. 4e does not force you to soak your fair share of the damage.

Also if it's good tactics in other editions then they guide you to it as well yet you single out 4e simply for making it more obvious that these are good tactics.



You also don't get to spread falsehoods. Like 4e forcing you to do things that it actually doesn't force you to do.

Even so, in my experience the phrase "the best status condition to inflict is dead" definitely applied to 4e. You were almost always better contributing to damage than inflicting short term de-buffs.

 

[Micah Sweet]

This approach had serious issues though. A seriously tough character with a high hit die and good Constitution who was reduced to 1 hp would take an absurd time to heal compared to a frail wizard who'd been reduced to 1.

Certainly the argument could be made that because the hearty character took more damage, that their wounds were more severe. However, given that those wounds didn't impair them, they couldn't be that bad. And it really didn't make much sense that the toughest man in the world would take weeks to recover from being near death (but never actually at or below 0 HP) while an incredibly frail character with 2 HP would be back to full the next day.

Ultimately though, I agree with @Oofta . We always had a cleric with us and relied on them to heal. We were never down for more than a day or three.

I always thought a good mechanic would be to have various sources of healing heal a percentage of the user's hp, rather than a derived semi-random number. That part of 4e healing was alright. I just didn't care for the healing surges themselves, and preferred a source of healing connected to something in the world.

 

[Undrave]

I just didn't care for the healing surges themselves, and preferred a source of healing connected to something in the world.

Healing Surges ARE connected to something in the world?! They're your reserve of energy, your stamina and determination. Why do you think you use one with something literally called 'Second Wind'?

 

[Garthanos]

Healing Surges ARE connected to something in the world?! They're your reserve of energy, your stamina and determination. Why do you think you use one with something literally called 'Second Wind'?

The real life second wind is an interesting phenomena it does do some healing at a molecular level even (not just pain killing but purportedly fixing damage caused by the exertion as it flushes out lactic acid and the like). Back when I actually was athletic enough to push myself I did experience several times, like an emotional rush kind of.

 

[Staffan]

IDK, I used them for exploration more than anything, as did most players I saw, and some classes had social interaction related powers, as well.

Hmm. Let's look at the utility powers of some of the classes in the PHB1. The bolded ones are the ones I figure could have lots of uses for solving things out of combat.

Cleric 2: Bless, Cure Light Wounds, Divine Aid, Sanctuary, Shield of Faith
Cleric 6: Bastion of Health, Cure Serious Wounds, Divine Vigor, Holy Lantern.
Cleric 10: Astral Refuge, Knights of Unyielding Valor, Mass Cure Light Wounds, Shielding Word.
Cleric 16: Astral Shield, Cloak of Peace, Divine Armor, Hallowed Ground.
Cleric 22: Angel of the Eleven Winds, Clarion Call of the Astral Sea, Cloud Chariot, Purify, Spirit of Health.

Fighter 2: Boundless Endurance, Get Over Here, No Opening, Unstoppable.
Fighter 6: Battle Awareness, Defensive Training, Unbreakable.
Fighter 10: Into the Fray, Last Ditch Evasion, Stalwart Guard.
Fighter 16: Interposing Shield, Iron Warrior, Surprise Step.
Fighter 22: Act of Desperation, No Surrender.

Ranger 2: Crucial Advice, Unbalancing Parry, Yield Ground.
Ranger 6: Evade Ambush, Skilled Companion, Weave Through the Fray.
Ranger 10: Expeditious Stride, Open the Range, Undaunted Stride.
Ranger 16: Evade the Blow, Longstrider, Momentary Respite.
Ranger 22: Forest Ghost, Hit the Dirt, Master of the Hunt, Safe Stride

Wizard 2: Expeditious Retreat, Feather Fall, Jump, Shield.
Wizard 6: Dimension Door, Disguise Self, Dispel Magic, Invisibility, Levitate, Wall of Fog.
Wizard 10: Arcane Gate, Blur, Mirror Image, Resistance.
Wizard 16: Displacement, Fly, Greater Invisibility, Stoneskin.
Wizard 22: Mass Fly, Mordenkainen's Mansion, Time Stop

I'm not going to go through all the classes, but I think the trend is pretty clear. Sure, some utility powers are not necessarily combat-related, but most of them are (and a significant portion of those I marked are ones that let you fly or something similar, because that is amazingly useful in many situations). This may have changed in later books, but at least this was the state of the game when first released.

As for my choice of classes, I started with the first ones in the book, then decided I didn't want to do them all and figured the ranger and wizard would probably have the best chance of non-combat ones.

 

[Garthanos]

social interaction power... Im fond of skill powers (ok this might be a more than a little OP)

 

[Garthanos]

The game had tons of material during its short life... saying oh lets look at 1 book LOL.

even MPII with the various Martial Practices was out in 2010 ...(a grand total of 2 years after the start of it.)

 

[Micah Sweet]

Healing Surges ARE connected to something in the world?! They're your reserve of energy, your stamina and determination. Why do you think you use one with something literally called 'Second Wind'?

Fair enough, perhaps I just don't care for the connection then. I can't get away from the idea that healing doesn't mean healing, and damage doesn't mean damage.

I played 4th ed for three years, and ran it for one. We had a lot of fun, and my 4th ed campaign was one of my favorites. Ultimately, however, the heavy focus on mechanics first, come up with something to explain it in game later ended up turning me off the system. Just not what I wanted in D&D.