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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7135716" data-attributes="member: 996">Yes, I've even gone there.  I've also consistently seen it backfire.  You make a huge deal out of once-in-a-campaign-level resurrection, and, then that PC just up and dies again out of the blue, or another PC as or more deserving/central-to-the-plot/whatever does, or the player moves away or otherwise becomes unavailable.   That can tend to get you a game of Paranoid Fantasy Roleplaying rather than Heroic Fantasy Roleplaying - "not that there's anything wrong with that..."  ;P  That actually is something that kinda came back with 5e, because healing resources, though perfectly adequate overall, are a little weak and combats are tuned to be fast, so staying on offense rather than standing up an ally (especially doing so 'inefficiently' with the low-hps restored by Healing Word) often seems the way to go.  It's similar to the situation in 3.5, really.  Out-of-combat healing is resource-efficient (cheap wands in 3.5, HD not useful for anything else in 5e) and using your action offensively is very effective (because of OP spells & combos in 3.x, and fast-combat-tuning in 5e).   That sounds like a problem, but how do you "preemptively act to protect one another" in D&D?   Especially in 5e, how is just focusing fire to reduce the threat posed by enemies by simply dropping them ASAP not the most obvious way to do that? Not sure I see the distinction.  If you mean healing an ally to prevent them from dropping, yes, it's seen as a weaker strategy both because healing can't generally keep up with damage inflicted and because of the next point... Definitely true in an analytic sense.  It's more efficient to let the enemy 'waste' damage in overkilling an ally, then negating all that excess damage Certainly true.  In 3.5 you could count on ending a fight very quickly and in 4e dying rules were pretty forgiving so you could count on an ally staying alive for a round or few while you did so.  In 5e, both are true, and "fight close to the end" could be the case quite early in the battle...While I generally agree with the third bullet myself (even though I find it somewhat reckless in some circumstances), the first bullet really annoys me. It has over and again being detrimental to the party tactics, but selfishness usually takes over and they never learn the lesson, even when adventurers start dying as a result of a battle becoming tougher. "Whack-a-mole healing," we call it.  It's always been an issue in any past edition or variant that had any dying options beyond instant-death-at-0-hps, because healing an ally in combat could always be 'wasted' if that ally didn't take any more damage that fight.  Heal-from-0 and very generous dying rules (being dropped is even less life-threatening in 5e than it was in 4e), certainly build upon that incentive to a greater degree than ever, though.  But it'd be very hard to get away from by making combat 'deadlier' or healing/raising rarer or weaker or harder to use, because that only makes those less attractive options compared to all-out 'nova' offense that leverages 5e's fast-combat design to drop enemies faster than they can drop allies, rather than keeping allies up. A good case in point.  By raising the stakes, you make the most expedient option (full out offense from the surprise round on) that much more attractive. Then once someone is dropped they can forget about being healed, because it's a 'wasted' action in the action economy (and a wasted slot), and the efficient way to go is to let the ally recover using HD after the fight.  Trying to heal to stay ahead of enemy damage is also still a losing proposition, so, again, full-on offense would seem like the winning strategy, leading to rollovers that don't feel 'dangerous,' leading to the DM upping the difficulty... What extra pains?  Probably not pro-active healing while the tough PC is still up.  Trying to take turns evenly-absorbing damage is theoretically efficient but tough to pull off and probably out of character for a lot of PCs. If you want to get away from whack-a-mole healing, you do, indeed, need to get rid of heal-from-0 as you suggest, track negatives, die at negative CON or 1/2 hps or something, and require healing to heal those negatives.  But, you'd also need to make healing more potent across the board - for instance, when you're healed by magic, you can also spend 1 HD/spell level to get back more hps, and/or healing spells could use the target's HD size instead of their usual dice, and/or the caster's stat or the target's CON could add to hps recovered, etc...  That way keeping an ally up with in-combat healing seems more viable vs healing only dropped allies or only stabilizing dropped allies and maximizing slots & actions available for offense.Speaking of offense the other thing you might want to do is re-tune monster stats and combat rules to produce longer, more elaborate combats that can't be rolled over so quickly.  It'd mean going against the 'fast combat' goal of 5e, which is among it's best-supported goals, but it would also weaken the all-offense 'nova' strategy. Not an unusual phenomenon.  You can find several 'whack-a-mole' threads about it, here on ENWorld. Nod.  It's just that that tweak might, intuitively, be towards making the game less risky (it already seems pretty /easy/ but that's potentially a different quality than risky or deadly) rather than more. She may not have been that wrong, if no one else could heal.  6-8 hps making a difference vs the damage dished out by a giant? Assuming no healing... That depends on the damage output of the enemy, too.  If the healing buys an ally an extra round of attacking, and the ally is about twice as good at attacking as you would have been attacking with the same-level slot, maybe.  If the heal stands a decent chance of making no difference (you don't know which wounded ally is going to be attacked next, heal one, and the other gets dropped, for instance, or you heal an ally and the next hit drops him, anyway). It may seem to generate weird fiction, but what you describe is a pretty reasonable way of managing hp resources, given that the Paladin is the prime/only source of in-combat healing.  She can't afford to drop, the most efficient use of her healing on behalf of allies is to stand them up when they've been overkilled to leverage the heal-from-0 rule while preserving their actions (though in some cases, that might not work out so well, depending on the initiative cycle). "Early healing" is kinda a guessing game.  Who will be attacked next?  Will they be hit?  For how much damage?</blockquote>

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