D&D without healing surges

[Garthanos]

I choose option #2 because I run an urban game and have adventures lasting many days with very few encounters. If I were running a more traditional game with dungeon crawls having a dozen encounters and adventures lasting a single day, a variation on option #1 would probably be better.

There does seem to be a campaign style factor involved in all this (just like the 15 minute day wont even bother many).... ie how intense or intermittent is the action in game world time. I could have three heavy surge requiring encounters per game session and have those only likely to ever occur stretched out over a week of game time without it bothering me that the heros are fully prepared for each encounter, they were unlikely to hit the next one where healing surges mattered for a couple days anyway.

 

[CapnZapp]

The only issue I see is "realism". Removing surges and letting a short rest recover all HP means fights are always consequence-free. If you survive, you are unhurt. However, balance-wise, I don't see any real issues with it.

Well, after most fights you recover all HP using the core rules too...

...I want to make every fight into that "last" fight for the day!

Anyway, thanks for your feedback!

 

[CapnZapp]

You should probably limit potions, all the same - one per encounter, say.

At higher levels, the lower level healing potions are effectively free, so just as well not deal with that.

Probably the biggest downside is that there's no cost at all to 'showboat' combats... that is, ones where the PCs are pretty much guaranteed to win, you get to see how cool they are when they do it, and see how few resources they use doing it... for those healing surges are the primary resource used.

Not every combat should have serious risk of party loss, after all.

I'm fine with showboat combats.

I'm less fine with combats that are one degree harder - combats where one purpose is to see if the party will lose only one HS or if they need to use up two.

I can certainly live with no bothering to track that at all - our group doesn't game more than once a week tops, and so a string of "appropriate" combats, where really only the last one gets tense, is simply too time-consuming a campaign model for us.

Instead, we need (and want) to go straight to the beef. And there surges (and the powers that use them) get in the way, making it far too easy to heal up all the PCs that get attacked.

So it seems to make sense to simply scrap surges, if we can't use them for their intended purpose.

 

[CapnZapp]

I don't think this *entirely* hijacks the original thread because both options address the same issue. I think the way to eliminate the 15 minute day is to remove mechanical incentives for resting. This thread has (so far) put two basic options on the table:

1) There is no point in resting because you effectively have infinite healing surges.

2) There is no point in resting because a 6-hour Long Rest recovers no healing surges. Healing surges come back after a long time (a week, between adventures, whatever).

As I see it the "day" in Extended Rest is something WotC shouldn't have made so static.

In one campaign, "hour" might be more appropriate. In yours, you have settled on "week". In a game involving sailing across an ocean, even "month" might be best.

But really, it would have been so much better if WotC stated that what is "day" for one adventure can change into "fortnight" (or whatever) for the next. Different storylines have different pacing, and I don't see any mechanical reason why this time duration should be fixed even within one campaign.

But to wrap up that digression - I don't really see the day/week switch as big change of mechanics, and certainly not something on par with doing away with having to keep track of surges altogether.

So, yes, I would appreciate it if you could start a new thread for varying the extended rest intervals. I really don't see that having much of a bearing on what I want to discuss here, namely what the implications are of removing surges altogether.

Implications, I'm sure, that can have much more of an impact, because it represents an actual change of the rules.

Thanks!

 

[Roger]

What would happen if you simply remove healing surges from the game?

* Several diseases require rewrites
* Starvation, thirst, and suffocation rules require (another) rewrite
* Several monsters require attack rewrites. A few who have their own healing surges would require rewrites.
* Numerous magic items require rewrites

I suspect they're more pervasive in the design than they might first appear.


Cheers,
Roger

 

[keterys]

You change the value of Con, since it no longer provides surges. I'm not sure that's a huge part of what it provides, but there you go.

 

[Shieldhaven]

Expanding on Roger's comment:

- the DMG also recommends a depletion of healing surges as a type of cost for failing a skill challenge.
- the death of a summoned creature in the newly-posted Arcane Power excerpt costs the caster a healing surge.
- I think you lose the note of "self-sacrifice" from the paladin's Lay On Hands mechanics. Correspondingly, paladins lose one of their distinct advantages over fighters - a larger pool of healing surges.

With reference to one of the OP's remarks, I find that it is impractical, in terms of pacing and player interest, for all of the fights to be significant. Things garner player interest in part from contrast. To put that another way, if you always have your car's stereo cranked up to the maximum volume, what do you do when your favorite song comes on?

Haven

 

[CapnZapp]

* Several diseases require rewrites
* Starvation, thirst, and suffocation rules require (another) rewrite
* Several monsters require attack rewrites. A few who have their own healing surges would require rewrites.
* Numerous magic items require rewrites

I suspect they're more pervasive in the design than they might first appear.


Cheers,
Roger

Thanks for thinking about this.

I'm probably not going to remove surges from the game completely. As you say, it's probably more trouble than it's worth. And besides, it's not removing surges per se that is my real goal.

 

[keterys]

Could also do something in the middle, like - use your limitations as you've outlined, plus if you're at 0 surges all healing is halved or perhaps even more affected.