D&D 5E 5e, Heal Thyself! Is Healing Too Weak in D&D?

[Mannahnin]

I never minded playing a cleric...even in B/X, when the cleric had to use blunt weapons and had to cast certain spells in reverse. At least a cleric felt like a cleric, instead of the same fighter/wizard as everyone else (except you went to church once).

TBF, in B/X Clerics are arguably overpowered, at least for the first few levels. They do definitely feel different though, because their spell list has relatively little overlap with wizards, and their plate armor keeps them a respectable front liner despite having slightly less offense than Fighters.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

TBF, in B/X Clerics are arguably overpowered, at least for the first few levels. They do definitely feel different though, because their spell list has relatively little overlap with wizards, and their plate armor keeps them a respectable front liner despite having slightly less offense than Fighters.

Totally.

They got kind of a bad rap because you did have to fill up on healing spells .... but ....

You had total niche protection (because you had the healz!).

You were a very competent front-line fighter.

You could also turn the undead- not a small thing.

Clerics rocked. And in B/X, the fighting gap between clerics and fighters was relatively small.

 

[Lyxen]

Clerics rocked. And in B/X, the fighting gap between clerics and fighters was relatively small.

In most editions of the game, actually. Honestly, Full Spellcasting ability, strong armor and shield and additional powers ? Sign me in, in addition to the fact that I have no problem playing religious characters, quite the contrary actually.

 

[jmartkdr2]

And why haven't any of you people who don't like the healing rules in 5E just changed them for your table? The game has been out for 8 years. Have you all just been suffering in silence this entire time? That seems to have been... unnecessary.

And also... so the game doesn't allow you to play every single concept you can think of in an optimal way. Some ways cannot be optimized without adjusting rules. Some ways can't really be done at all without new concepts or re-writes. This should not be a shock to anyone, and is the entire reason games like Champions / Hero System were created... in order to give players the ability to build almost any single concept they could think of in an RPG and have it be pretty balanced across the entire spectrum of the gameplay.

D&D ain't Hero System and it would take a lot of work to turn it into something approaching it. Just ask Steve Kenson.

I have found a way to make healers who can heal big: allow pcs to spend hit dice when magically healed. We did 1 HD for free for every die of magical healing (or per 5 hp healed for non-rolled healing) - so a 3rd-level cure wounds would also let you spend 3 Hit Dice (if you wanted to and had them to spend.) It allows for big one-turn heals. Lay on Hands theoretically allows for some very big heals.

This was not a total solution - we didn't add a penalty for going to zero - but I suspect if we did it would change the way combat plays out and make dedicated healers a much more viable concept.

BUT that assumes you want that, and overall we decided we didn't, so we went back to the rules as written more or less.

 

[Voadam]

TBF, in B/X Clerics are arguably overpowered, at least for the first few levels. They do definitely feel different though, because their spell list has relatively little overlap with wizards, and their plate armor keeps them a respectable front liner despite having slightly less offense than Fighters.

Totally.

They got kind of a bad rap because you did have to fill up on healing spells .... but ....

You had total niche protection (because you had the healz!).

You were a very competent front-line fighter.

You could also turn the undead- not a small thing.

Clerics rocked. And in B/X, the fighting gap between clerics and fighters was relatively small.

Basic clerics got zero spells at 1st level. That is no magic, no healing for one third of the basic set level range and the common start over point when you go to 0 hp and instant death start a new character.

A 1st level cleric was basically a fighter with weaker weapon options, and a smaller hit die plus turning. They remain a level behind magic-users in their magic once they get it. They are the bards of Basic.

Unlimited undead turning was a cool useful situational power though. I preferred that to x times per day rationing of attempted turnings.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

That is incorrect. If there are 4 of you and one enemy, giving up your action to cancel the enemy’s action is a great deal. The break even point is when there are 4 of you and 4 of them.

Of course, if you are in a 4-on-4 situation, your high-level heals are probably outpacing their damage.

This is only true if your opponents are exactly as capable as your allies, and (more importantly) your action does, in fact, completely negate the enemy action. Both of these things are usually incorrect in 5e.

If you face a horde of small monsters, explicitly intended by 5e rules, negating only one enemy turn is wasted effort. Defeating multiple enemies is always better--not just in an ideal case, but in practice too--than temporarily inconveniencing a single opponent. If you face a "solo" monster, it will almost always be designed to actually threaten a whole group of PCs, and thus it will be very hard to completely negate the actions the monster takes. (Unless you're a full casters using offensive spells, of course...)

Suppose you are 4 5th level adventurers. You are fighting 4 CR 2 ogres. On average, your 2nd level and 3rd level heals are handily outpacing their damage. Your heals always hit. Their attacks don’t.

Sure. Such fights also don't require much if any healing in the first place because they are way below par. Seriously, 2 CR 2 creatures against a 4 person 5th level party?? You could hardly make a less useful point of comparison. Even with the "difficulty multiplier," your example encounter is explicitly Easy! (Easy is 1000 difficulty-weighted XP, Medium is 2000, fight is worth 900 with difficulty multiplier 1.5, net difficulty is 1350, so this is a fairly Easy encounter.)

In fact, against AC 16, if the cleric has 16 Wis, your 1st level heals are keeping pace with the ogre’s hits, given that he needs at least a 10 to hit the player.

And I would expect an "Easy" encounter to work that way, imagine that!

The combats mostly rely on iterations of an attrition model, and tension in combat (to the extent it is generated in 5e) would be dissipated by increasing the amount of healing to equal the amount of damage during combat.

Okay. What about bumping healing up, but making it so characters can only be healed (by any means, including magic) "half proficiency + CON" times per encounter, but freely outside of battle? Gives merit to having a positive CON, doesn't require fancy or elaborate changes, and very much creates tension rather than removing it, while making people who derive joy from healing feel pretty great. Further, it gives players a reason to avoid "whack-a-mole" (they cannot rely on being popped back up), and a reason to consider ablative or non-healing sources of protection (THP, AC buffs/enemy hit debuffs, evasive tactics, etc.)

Frankly, it seems clear to me that you get everything you want AND let others get what they want by doing something like this. As opposed to having to add even more punishment/outright banning of valid, smart tactics ("whack-a-mole") on top of further reducing things other people like and that you don't really care much about (making healing feel chunky and worthwhile).

 

[James Gasik]

Do people like "whack-a-mole"?

 

[Lyxen]

Do people like "whack-a-mole"?

I don't really like the principle of it, however:

1. Although people seem to complain about it all the time, it does not happen in our campaigns at all, yes some characters get revived during combat, but it's usually for a last push or to allow a retreat/flight, so nothing untowards here (I'm actually curious as to whether it really happens at other tables).
2. If it's not abused (which is the case at least for us), then it's actually fairly consistent with the genre, where protagonist are stunned out of combat frequently - and not infrequently thought dead - only to come back and save the day, or be knocked out again.

So I guess that, as usual, it's a question of degree. The degree at our tables is extremely reasonable and creates no problem, so barring people coming with actual anecdotes, I would tend to think it's another of these internet exaggerations.

Also, honestly, if you really want to avoid this, you can always cast your healing word at a higher level. Again, I suspect that the problem is caused by people who don't want to do it for their precious slots, in particular people complaining that they lose efficiency by using these higher level spell slots for d4 instead of d8 (totally forgetting that they get the benefit from range and a bonus action only)...

 

[James Gasik]

I don't really like the principle of it, however:

1. Although people seem to complain about it all the time, it does not happen in our campaigns at all, yes some characters get revived during combat, but it's usually for a last push or to allow a retreat/flight, so nothing untowards here (I'm actually curious as to whether it really happens at other tables).
2. If it's not abused (which is the case at least for us), then it's actually fairly consistent with the genre, where protagonist are stunned out of combat frequently - and not infrequently thought dead - only to come back and save the day, or be knocked out again.

So I guess that, as usual, it's a question of degree. The degree at our tables is extremely reasonable and creates no problem, so barring people coming with actual anecdotes, I would tend to think it's another of these internet exaggerations.

Also, honestly, if you really want to avoid this, you can always cast your healing word at a higher level. Again, I suspect that the problem is caused by people who don't want to do it for their precious slots, in particular people complaining that they lose efficiency by using these higher level spell slots for d4 instead of d8 (totally forgetting that they get the benefit from range and a bonus action only)...

It's a little rough to do, since the extra d4's rarely give enough hit points to prevent someone from being conked out again. Which is probably where my frustration came from as a Cleric. If someone was taken down, I wanted to heal them so it wouldn't just happen again before my next turn. And sometimes, that just wasn't the case, even with Cure Wounds.

But this does have a lot to do with the way I experienced the game, with less and more dangerous combats. AL requires you to complete the session ~2 hours, and in a home game, I've found more than 3 encounters, unless they are "you see four orcs standing watch" which take one round at best, eats up way too much time.

Obviously, that makes me an outlier, because a lot of people claim they have no problem providing 6 encounters or so in their sessions. I guess that's what would happen, if we were like "ok, no table talk, minimal roleplay, no snack breaks, let's get this done!", and D&D is more of a social experience (for me) than that.

 

[Mannahnin]

Basic clerics got zero spells at 1st level. That is no magic, no healing for one third of the basic set level range and the common start over point when you go to 0 hp and instant death start a new character.

A 1st level cleric was basically a fighter with weaker weapon options, and a smaller hit die plus turning. They remain a level behind magic-users in their magic once they get it. They are the bards of Basic.

Unlimited undead turning was a cool useful situational power though. I preferred that to x times per day rationing of attempted turnings.

"One third of the Basic set level range" is a bit deceptive, given that they hit 2nd level and get that spell and second HD at only 1500xp. Clerics hit 4th level and are on to the Expert set before Elves hit 3rd and not long after MUs hit 3rd.