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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8609645" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Since I was one of the people who triggered this essay, albeit not the very first, I can explain my thoughts.Firstly: All the discussion about daily healing is irrelevant. Neither the other poster nor I said anything whatsoever about daily healing, which I completely agree is more than adequate in terms of daily HP regain. As a result, a significant chunk of Snarf's essay is irrelevant to me...with one minor caveat. Hit Dice.Snarf's characterization of Hit Dice is incorrect. They do not actually recover your full HP, at least on average, and they only approach that if you actually have all of them. You only recover half your total HD with a long rest, so that isn't a reliable source of healing. E.g., a level 8 Fighter with 16 Constitution gets eight 1d10+3 hits (average 68) of HP, while having 13+7*(6+3) = 13+63 = 76 HP, so those Hit Dice only restore 68/76 = ~89.5% of your total HP if you have all your hit dice. If you only have half, as will be common if you're burning through them to heal, you'll only get ~44.7%. Meanwhile, a puny 10 Con (non-Dragon) Sorcerer of the same level would get 8d6 flat, for a total of 8*3.5 = 28 HP while having 6+7*4 = 6+28 = 32 HP (gaining 28/32 = 87.5% on average). Edit: Further, as noted by [USER=907]@Staffan[/USER] the longer length of "short" rests actually encourages taking more long rests and fewer short rests, which further erodes the value of Hit Dice. It's a very unfortunate "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation: if you do use them up regularly, you're constantly at half-strength. If you don't, well, not only are you not getting that healing, but you're probably taking advantage of the nightly full heal up instead, since it is not easy to make truly consistent time pressure where 8 hrs rest is totally unacceptable but 2-3 hours rest is completely fine, no problems.Second: everything Snarf has said about "of course damage should be higher than healing" has missed a key point. I was not talking about damage players do vs healing players do, I was talking about damage players take vs healing they do. PC damage output is one of the two variables (alongside monster HP) that feeds into overall combat pace, which is an important design concern, but not directly relevant to topic of PC healing input. Instead, monster damage output is the directly relevant factor, which adjusts the volatility (how quickly PC status changes) and lethality (how likely PCs are to die). My issue is that the extant healing rules produce very little volatility, which means they aren't very "exciting" because once you hit near-dead status there's little (if any) reason to change that until combat ends, while producing high lethality unless the players resort to the oft-maligned "whack-a-mole" or "pop-up" healing. Since I am making no claims whatsoever about whether PC healing output should exceed PC damage output, a further chunk of the original essay is also irrelevant.Third, as alluded in my previous post, it is a mistake to presume that the only way to ensure that healing is scarce (and thus encourage risk-taking behavior) is to make healing small relative to incoming damage. One can, instead, make healing rare in comparison to incoming damage, tweaking frequency down and therefore amount up. That causes players to have to make a nontrivial choice: risk the extra danger of maybe not having enough resources to bounce back, for the reward of ending the fight quickly so it doesn't drain even more resources. This is a critical area that Healing Surges introduced extremely well in 4e and which is very poorly supported by the Hit Dice rules in 5e (in part for the reasons listed above).So....I have very little to say to Snarf directly here because the vast majority of his points are completely irrelevant to the question of whether in-combat healing is worthwhile. He highlights a valid point--that there must be comparative scarcity of healing, in order to force choices to be made--but falls down by presuming that scarcity means small amounts when it could instead mean few uses. Had 5e retained more of what makes Healing Surges work, it would in fact have very little of either "whack-a-mole" healing or "rocket tag."* Instead, it would have much more engaging combats that were more volatile (frequent and significant changes of state, creating tension and excitement) while actually being (somewhat) less lethal (as critical danger would be more easily averted).TL;DR: End-of-day healing is fine, but irrelevant, and HD do not work as Snarf described. Damage output vs healing output is irrelevant; damage taken vs healing output is, and that's very different. If we tune healing frequency down but healing amount up, we can make healing worthwhile but limited, rather than worthless unless "whack-a-mole."*For those unfamiliar with the term, "rocket tag" refers to gameplay where damage or debility occurs extremely rapidly, causing very quick wins or losses with little time to shift gears or rally. In the most extreme (sometimes literal) cases, both sides are armed with rocket launchers and a single successful attack causes instant death to the target(s). Obviously, 5e is not quite that instantaneous, but monster damage output is extremely significant compared to player HP and player healing quantity (as opposed to frequency).</blockquote>

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