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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FireLance" data-source="post: 5226002" data-attributes="member: 3424">Perhaps a better question is: do your players feel that they aren't being challenged?I both play and DM, and I know for a fact that fights often look very different from each end of the DM screen. A fight which the DM thinks the players beat easily may not seem that way to the players simply because they don't know everything that the DM does. Anyway, to address some random points that have been raised so far:1. The cloak of the walking wounded has no effect on how many milestones the PCs can reach. If the PCs didn't spend a healing surge during the fight, they would have spent it to recover hit points after the fight, anyway. In fact, if they have a leader role PC in the party, they are usually better off spending healing surges after a fight to take advantage of the hit point recovery bonuses that he can provide.2. Even with the expenditure of an action point, a standard action spent using second wind is a standard action spent not attacking. In other words, regardless of whether or not a non-dwarf PC spends an action point so that he can attack in the same round that he uses his second wind, the fact remains that he used his second wind when he could have attacked instead. Whether or not this is a good decision will depend on the circumstances of the fight, but if spending a standard action to use your second wind instead of attacking is a bad decision, it remains a bad decision even if you spend an action point to do it.3. The real question is: if the PCs did not have cloaks of the walking wounded, would it have made any difference to the outcome of the fight? In order to answer this question, note which PCs have used second wind and a cloak of the walking wounded to spend two healing surges instead of one. If the characters end the fight with more than 25% of their hit points, the cloak of the walking wounded probably would not have made any difference to the outcome of the fight (and if they ended the fight still unbloodied, the cloak almost certainly did not). The presence of a leader PC might make this estimation more difficult since you need to make an assessment of whether he would have used his healing powers on another target instead, but using a similar rule of thumb, if the PCs healed by the leader end the fight with more than 25% of their hit points, the healing probably would not have made a difference to the outcome of the fight.In my view, the effect of cloaks of the walking wounded is mostly psychological. The player feels comforted that his PC is not that close to being bloodied or dying, but most of the time, the expenditure of an extra healing surge during a fight will not make any difference to the outcome. In fact, by making it more attractive for the PCs to spend an action to use their second wind instead of attacking, it might allow monsters to survive longer, causing the party to lose more hit points in the long run.</blockquote>

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