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<blockquote data-quote="Mengu" data-source="post: 5957007" data-attributes="member: 65726">Actually 4e started out where you could play without a healer perfectly fine. If you played without a healer and went with by the book encounters, combat was fast and dangerous, second wind, and a few self healing tools like comeback strike were all you needed in a pinch to get back into the fight. Monsters not doing too much damage also meant you could conserve surges during short rests, and go into a fight with a few hit points down, and still be fine.However, if you did have a leader, things became too easy, and risk of losing was diminished significantly. DM's remedied this by increasing the challenge. Then combat started taking too long. To remedy that, they changed up monsters so monsters did a lot more damage, so lower level monsters would still be significant threats, and killing them would take less time.This seemed to work, but now, if you don't have a healer, bouncing back from a monster nova is extremely difficult if not impossible. So we went back to needing healers. Also with monsters doing more damage, people feel they have to heal up to full after every encounter because otherwise you might not survive the next monster nova, so surges are being wasted which can be remedied by healers, but it can still shorten the adventuring day.The lesson here is, the deadlier you want the system to be, the more you're requiring the presence of healers. Ideally groups should be encouraged but not required to have healers. I can think of a few gamist ways to achieve this goal, but not sure how we can get there in a way which will satisfy simulationists, with only the hit point system as the relevant expendable resource.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Mengu, post: 5957007, member: 65726"] Actually 4e started out where you could play without a healer perfectly fine. If you played without a healer and went with by the book encounters, combat was fast and dangerous, second wind, and a few self healing tools like comeback strike were all you needed in a pinch to get back into the fight. Monsters not doing too much damage also meant you could conserve surges during short rests, and go into a fight with a few hit points down, and still be fine. However, if you did have a leader, things became too easy, and risk of losing was diminished significantly. DM's remedied this by increasing the challenge. Then combat started taking too long. To remedy that, they changed up monsters so monsters did a lot more damage, so lower level monsters would still be significant threats, and killing them would take less time. This seemed to work, but now, if you don't have a healer, bouncing back from a monster nova is extremely difficult if not impossible. So we went back to needing healers. Also with monsters doing more damage, people feel they have to heal up to full after every encounter because otherwise you might not survive the next monster nova, so surges are being wasted which can be remedied by healers, but it can still shorten the adventuring day. The lesson here is, the deadlier you want the system to be, the more you're requiring the presence of healers. Ideally groups should be encouraged but not required to have healers. I can think of a few gamist ways to achieve this goal, but not sure how we can get there in a way which will satisfy simulationists, with only the hit point system as the relevant expendable resource. [/QUOTE]

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