Can you get too much healing?

[outsider]

Maybe make the capture/killing of a specific monster an important goal of the campaign, and make it so the monster knows the players are coming. If they take an extended rest, the monster flees the dungeon(or wherever they are). They'll have to try to track him down and catch him the next adventure(where again, he'll successfully flee the dungeon if they take an extended rest), repeat adventure after adventure until they actually tough it out without an extended rest. As long as you don't press them too hard on the adventure where they don't take the extended rest they'll hopefully develop a working strategy that doesn't involve an extended rest after every fight.

A good one off adventure that will prevent the extended rest is to disrupt some sort of ritual that's already in progress. Or you could simply offer them an optional(but rewarding) time sensitive quest in every adventure. They can still complete the adventure if they take the extended rest, but there's now a price to doing so.

 

[Skallgrim]

...
What I mean by "too much" healing is if everyone in the party takes a multiclass feat into a healing character. If this is a group of five, where one character already is a healer, you'd have five daily Healing Words plus two encounter Healing Words. Add to this a character in Dwarven Armor and perhaps two characters with powers like Comeback Strike, which adds three more daily healing surges.

And suddenly we're looking at a party with no less than 10 powers that return hit points, without including the less effective Second Wind and Healing Potions.

This makes it all but impossible for me to challenge the group in any given encounter, as healing will flow so freely (meaning that out of these 10 heals, 9 can be done in addition to making an attack. Only one works like Second Wind in that you'd have to give up your standard action to use it).

It also makes the group really sensitive to the 15-minute adventuring day syndrome. The difference between having most of those heals and not having them is huge in terms of being able to focus on damage output and not having to worry about running out of hp and the risk of death.

Basically, it makes the game revolve entirely around healing surges. Either they have them or they don't.

If they do: they're almost invulnerable to anything less than a level+4 encounter. Either I persist in throwing "appropriate" encounters at them, which are trivial in every way and really can be reduced to "how many surges do I need to use up?". Or I give them an exciting fight - but their capacity for healing means that this fight will both be the first and last for that day.

If they don't: they'll focus entirely on avoiding combat at all costs. I can't say I blame them. It's not fun to force combat upon characters that want nothing else than just to bed down (at ten in the morning) because they're acutely aware of their lack of healing.

It makes the players resent being forced to continue adventuring when they're out of healing surges and/or powers; and it makes me feel like a villain for forcing them.

Continuing without them is painful when they know they're so much more safe with them. They see absolutely no reason to ever volunteer to go on, if there is a choice at all.
...

OK, well, first, most of these healing resources use the characters's own Healing Surges, so while they have more access to them during a fight, they aren't any more capable of healing over the course of a day than any other party of adventurers. Thus, in theory, they shouldn't need any more challenging encounters than any other adventuring group.


Second, I know that you feel like "a villain" for forcing them to soldier on without access to their full brigade of healing surges, but GET OVER IT!

The entire group made a choice to pick powers that used a lot of healing surges. Then, in EACH encounter, they choose to use a LOT of those powers to heal (and thus expend healing surges). Then, they complain about being out of surges. Your party is a gang of babies.

You don't have to use a ton of healing surges in every encounter. You can play tactically, or carefully, or surgically. My group usually finishes each fight, even the level +3 ones, having used about two Healing Words, one Bastion of Health, and 1-5 second winds. We rely on the clerical healing first, since it is a minor action, and more effective, and sometimes, someone goes down.

Your party is CHOOSING to play balls-to-the-wall crazy and use up all of these healing surges in one fight, and then resent going on? Are these people heroes or professional athletes?

A group might CHOOSE to unleash all of their daily power in the first two rounds of a fight, to make it end quickly, but that doesn't mean the system is broken, or the DM is mean, if they have trouble with the next four fights when they have to fight them with encounter powers only.

The group has made a deliberate, really, really bad choice with their resource management, and is expecting a DM to rejigger the entire world to reflect it. Screw them.

First, explain the actual situation to the players (in case they are total dweebs):

"You are a party of heroic adventurers.

You will often be asked, or volunteer, or be paid, or be forced, into dangerous quests and adventures.

These adventures WILL NOT often consist of a single fight, after which you have a lovely dinner and a good night's rest.

Often, they will consist of a series of linked battles, or you may happen upon additional enemies. Sometimes, the enemies may attack you when you are not expecting it, or not ready for it. Sometimes, you may EVEN need to "take the battle to" an enemy who is going to do something horrible (sacrifice captives, summon demons, blow up a church) if you don't stop them VERY SOON.

In any case, you should not expect to be able to relax and move on only when you "volunteer" to do so.

During these adventures, you will marshall your resources. This will include ammunition, daily magic item powers, consumable items, daily powers, and healing surges.

If you CHOOSE to expend all of your resources, in any one category, or in multiple categories, in a single encounter, then, quite logically, you can expect them to be unavailable in another encounter. Drinking all of the potions in the first fight will not result in the goblins in the next room waiting for you to go home and buy more before they attack you.

This means, for those of you that haven't figured it out yet, that PLANNING on using all of your healing surges in the first fight MEANS that you will be unable to heal yourself in any subsequent fights."



Alternatively, if they simply can't wrap their tiny little minds around resource management in ANY WAY, run every encounter group as ONE BIG ENCOUNTER. Instead of having an equal level fight in the first room, then an equal level fight in the second area, then a sub level fight in the third area, then an above level fight in the fourth area, just use all of the monsters for a 4xlevel fight, and introduce them in waves. This will probably kill the adventurers, as they will never get their encounter powers back, but maybe their next group of characters will figure out how to CONSERVE AMMUNITION.

Seriously, there are real design tradeoffs to be made with the Extended Rest/Five Encounter design paradigm. I'm not disputing that, and I'm not claiming to have solved it. However, this isn't one of them.

This is a group of spoiled baby gamers who want to use daily resources as encounter resources. It's no different than wanting your daily spells and exploits to be available in each encounter. If you want to mollycoddle them, go ahead. But don't think those of us who expect our players to not be entirely brain-dead, and who expect HEROES to be heroic, are being mean to our group.

 

[Shadowsong666]

I don't get the point (well i do, but i think i don't want to - meh) here, really.
If the group specialized in getting as much healing power as possible let them use it! Just show them some guidelines from time to time. Really no need for a houserule here.

If they use too many healing surges tell them. May be they simply don't see the problem at all as your adventures are designed in a way that time does not matter. Make it matter!
Let adventures be time critical! Maybe they get send on a rescue mission to save the princess. The king can't pay the ransom and the big bad evil guy sent him a message that if there is no money flowing in 3 days the princess dies horribly and sent back in peaces. 3 days time - 1st day the party gets into the plot - 1/2 day for the travel to bad guys - 1 day time for the rescue - 1/2 day fleeing to safety. If they rest and don't accept the fact that there is no time for that - let the princess die - or lose an eye, ear, hand etc.... make them pay for their failings. And let this story get around in your world.... "oh, you are the group that.... no thank you. we will look for other heroes..."

Let travel get critical in missions defending a town, city, or even kingdom. The longer they need - the worse the outcome. They could have saved the city if they hadn't rested after the second battle - now the city has fallen and its their fault.

Introduce monsters that eat up healing surges and design your fights so that they need some healing surges, but not all of them in 2 fights. If they rest to fight the "endboss" with full power let them suffer for such a thing (if applicable) - add stuff so that at the end they used up all their healing surges and came out barely alive. After that - tell them that he got informed that a group of heroes was coming for him and he organized himself some backup. He wouldn't have had it if they wouldn't have taken a rest.

Use other forms of attacks - grabs, pushes and try to throw some PCs other a cliff. Healing doesn't help here - tactic does.
Or let the healer get dominated for some time and battle it out against his former allies - healing the enemies with all his powers... gets very bad for the group very fast. beware!

Just mix it up so that your group gets pounded but also gets the upper hand at the end. They are the heroes - never forget that. The goal needs to be that they win - but let the road to victory be mean and ugly and evil as nothing else.

 

[Fedifensor]

It's not just having the ability to use healing surges, but the ability to increase the value of those surges. The MC feats are a better alternative than Second Wind, as you get dice to add to your surge value. Clerics are great healers because of Healer's Lore. Dwarven armor is the best of the things you listed, as it doesn't use a surge at all to heal you.

So, the question isn't whether they have too much healing. The question should be whether they're using that healing effectively, and if they're being careless because of the amount of healing they have. Why are they using so much healing in the first place? Do they need to get a better AC for their front-line characters? Do they draw OAs when they don't need to do so? Having lots of healing capability isn't a problem...but it may be the symptom of one.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think all the people that are suggesting that THE answer is to make adventures a clock race or a gauntlet are missing the point. Lets consider this from a standpoint of the campaign as a whole.

Lets say basically it takes around 6 encounters to level up. So maybe 2 weeks per level if you play every week. You can go through a tier in around 3-5 months. Now lets further figure an adventure may carry you through anything from 1 to 4 levels, maybe a bit more, maybe a few are even shorter. Probably 3 adventures per tier seems like a good general rule of thumb. Now you can run a gauntlet one time, and a clock race another time, but probably not all of any one adventure is going to be either one, so at MOST you might make 50% of encounters part of a time constraint.

Lets assume you can reuse a given ploy in some form every tier, which isn't too bad. Doing so more often then that starts to get pretty stale. So basically these kinds of suggestions don't solve the problem. On top of that they kind of limit the DMs options for plot lines as well. There still needs to be a more general fix.

As for why these particular players are eating up such an abundance of HS, there are a few things to consider. First of all they might use less if they switched to different feats or MC powers. Probably won't make a HUGE difference except at really low levels, but that may help to explain it, the players are making a choice, more healing vs more offense and defense.

Secondly not every group is made up of a bunch of tactical charop geniuses that are into number crunching there way to decimating every N+3 encounter with hardly a scratch. It may come as a revelation to most of the posters on this board, but the VAST majority of D&D players are not of that type, and they find even N level encounters fairly challenging. If the rules are basically structured and the adventures are basically structured such that those players have NO HOPE of playing successfully, then I submit that is a serious design flaw in the game. Frankly I think it IS a serious problem with 4e, the game is overly tactical. It is great that it CAN be that tactical, but other types of players are just as deserving of their candy too.

Finally, suppose CapnZapp's crew learns to use a bunch less HS per encounter? I don't see where that suddenly solves the problem. This is an issue where the rules, if used in a certain way, allow a party to nova. 4e was supposed to put a real crimp on novas, and if it fails to do that, then that too is a design flaw.

 

[outsider]

The more I think about it, the more I believe minor quests are the way to deal with this and other playstyle problems. Instead of bludgeoning them with time constraints and gauntlets of monsters, offer them an optional minor quest that has a time limit. Attach a minor(but noticeable) reward to it. If they want to complete the adventure by resting after every fight, let them. However, give them the option of completing the adventure within a certain timeframe to gain an extra 1000 xp or whatever. There's plenty of in character justifications you could attach to this, and most people I've played D&D with over the years would at least try for the extra reward.

 

[Shadowsong666]

I don't think there is THE answer to his problem. As a DM you need to find the answer yourself. You can only listen to other peoples ideas and try to come up with the solution for your group...

I got a paladin and a cleric in my group. The rest of the group was going MC cleric or warlord around 2nd level. They think that the more healing they have in their arsenal the better. There are times in the game the paladin or cleric can't heal - thats the point they use their powers to compensate.

But still - where is the problem? Let them compensate - thats why they took the MC they took. Let them use their abilities. Thats what players love to do - use their abilities - play their character...

Nearly every time my players get out of one encounter they lost some healing surges (around 1 or 2) and some are still bloodied. So normally we play around 3-4 encounters per game day (a game session is ~9-10hours long - once every other week) so they want a safe spot to rest from me - i deliver them one - game goes on. Not everytime - sometimes time is crucial and only half of the group can rest - the other can't because the rest gets interrupted early or some other thing. The game is not designed to make every encounter "a challenge to the max" but every encounter should weaken the group (rob a healing surge, cost a daily, potion etc. ) so that at the end the fight in the last encounter of the adventure gets a challenge to the death. Well, thats how i see it and how i want it to be. Letting every fight be tough as hell is just making the game feel worse and not letting heroes be heroes. Just puny little freaks who feel the same from level 1 to level 30.... bad mojo.

If my players would start losing more healing surges per encounter i would need to adjust. Have a look at the chars and figure out why. After that i could tell them or just adjust the encounters. Where is the problem? I mean - i can fudge dice rolls, drop an npc 20hp early or 50hp later... as long as it suites the game my players won't complain... if i design an encounter and it gets to heavy i simply make one or two creatues minions on the fly or let them do some stupid things (tactic wise) so that the problem gets less dramatic and gives players the possibility to turn the tide.

Most fun comes from scene description, letting your npcs come to life (even for a short time as one encounter) and giving players the opportunity to live the game and go in character as often as desired. Combat is part of it but its the part you can most easily access and edit.

 

[keterys]

I'm not sure I see how it's bludgeoning a party or being a villain to expect them to face more than one encounter per extended rest?

Heck, I'm pretty sure I'd make fun of anyone who suggested we couldn't handle more than one combat per day. And if they screwed up and ran out of dailies or surges in one combat, then the next combat should be an illustrative example of why to not do whatever they're doing wrong on their side or the DM is doing wrong on his.

First it is a totally meta-gamey houserule. There is not the faintest way to fluff it as anything else, so it simply feels hokey to the players.

Daily powers and healing surges are already 'metagame' - changing how you regain them doesn't make it more metagamey. If anything, it's _less_ metagamey because people know they can't just take a nap at any time to be 'poof, at 100%'.

'Rename Daily powers to Greater powers. You now regain greater powers and healing surges after you have completed a (story arc/adventure/minor quest/sessions/two - three milestones/whatever) and taken a rest.' Or whatever works for your group. Story Powers. Extreme Powers. Milestone powers. Adventure powers. Session powers. It's all good.

Except how many combats a party has per day is ALWAYS going to be largely in the hands of the party.

Sure, they can always run away. And then they lose - the gate is opened, the princess dies, the dragon eats an NPC they like, their magic item is corrupted and lost, a rival adventure gang gets there first and gets the fame and fortune, etc.

The party largely chooses what adventures they engage in, but they don't choose the pacing of that adventure.

Or you go with JoT's house rule and you don't even care about 'days' anymore. You know how many dailies they have per section of adventure and it doesn't matter if they decide to break off to go drinking before cracking into the Vault of Vecna - it'll still be tough when they come back.

 

[Regicide]

Short answer, your players are turtleing, have them fight turtles. They've given up offensive power for defensive, so have them fight defensive creatures which recover damage like them. Yes, these will be long fights, your players have chosen to heal rather than deal, point it out to them when they start complaining.

My variant on Tweet's house rule is that you only recover healing surge between adventures. This removes almost all incentives to take extra rests.

What that does is reward parties that have damage novas. Shorter fights mean less healing surges used. In other words it causes it's own problems. I wouldn't suggest doing it, Tweet's house rule is a bad one.

The problem I have with the extended rest houserule is twofold. First it is a totally meta-gamey houserule. There is not the faintest way to fluff it as anything else, so it simply feels hokey to the players.

Practically everything about 4E is meta-gamey right down to healing surges, I dont' see the house rule making it worse in that way.

Anyway, if you don't like your party resting, give them unlimited healing surges and don't let them rest.

 

[Mengu]

To answer the original post, yes, I think there is such a thing as too much healing. First of all, if you need so much healing that everyone in the party has to pick a multiclass healing power, either PC's are doing something wrong, or the DM is doing something wrong, or the players have terrible luck and miss all the time.

I think from a party design perspective, you need to balance the need to dish out damage, with the need to heal when things go bad. For instance, say a ranger has the options of warlord multiclass for once per day healing, or barbarian multiclass to dish out 2 additional damage per attack during one encounter. Dead monsters don't attack back, so the ranger should probably go with the barbarian multiclass. In case you do have some bad luck with a string of misses, let the wizard, who is not a primary damage dealer, pick up cleric multiclass for that extra daily healing your party may need.

As to the issue of going nova first combat of every day and running out of resources, I've never had this issue. If anything, I have an issue of my players not using any daily abilities in early encounters of the day, which makes these encounters harder than they might be with maybe one daily each from one or two characters.

And then there is the issue of nova chain infection. When they see one character spend an encounter power, action point, daily, they all follow suit, making a medium encounter very easy, but running them out of resources again.

Yet another issue in a party can be mismanagement of healing surges per character. Defenders can sometimes become a bit overzealous in their role and throw themselves in the middle of something they don't really need to be in the middle of. They end up spending 5 or 6 healing surges in one encounter (including what they spend during their short rest). Not a good sign when that's the first encounter of the day.

Players have to learn to manage their resources.

The DM has some responsibilities too of course. True, not every day has to be a chase for a time bomb. But interesting encounter design, and encounter difficulty does not always come from how many monsters you throw at the party. A fight that breaks out in the middle of a crowded market square where there are a lot of innocents, presents a completely different kind of challenge, when the attackers are harrasing commoners and PC's alike. This might be the only fight in the day, so you're not really challenging the resources of the players, you're challenging their tactics.

Another one of the jobs the DM has, is to know their party. If the party has a bunchof defenders and leaders, but no strikers, you'll want to avoid high HP fights. Low HP high damage artillery would be fine, since thanks to leaders, the healing will be fairly efficient. If you ave a party of leaders and strikers, those strikers will run out of healing surges fast, so you'll want to provide situations where the strikers get the first jump on their enemy more frequently than not. If you have a party of strikers and defenders, the only thing you have to avoid is very long fights or encounters with too many opponents that outnumber the PC's. Fights against elites and few higher level creatures will be perfect for this group.

I don't know if the system needs to be blamed for 15 minute adventuring days. I think the system is extremely flexible for many styles of play. It just requires some coordination from DM and players. A player that wants to be disruptive by novaing first encounter every day, playing wrecklessly, running out of healing surges, and insisting on an extending rest will accomplish his goal of being disruptive. The system does assume a bit of responsibility from both DM and players so everyone can enjoy the game.