Does D&D require healing magic? And is that a good thing?

[GrumpyOldMan]

Okay

Ok, this isn't really my question. One of my players brought it up. The question is basically, "Why does D&D require so much healing magic? Is it just to give the cleric player something to do?"
..

No role playing game REQUIRES anything. Not magic healing, not clerics, not fighters, not magic, not hit points. The game requires a set of rules which the players and referee agree to abide by. These rules can be as simple, or as complicated, as you, the referee, and your players want them to be. I’m no expert on DnD 3.5 but if I couldn’t create an adventure, within the rules, where the players were faced with a challenge that did not require combat and/or healing to resolve, I’d be surprised and very disappointed in the rules.

Game designers use rules to encourage a certain style of play. I suspect that Ipissimus is correct:

However, the average combat-centered DnD game is really a huge ego trip for the players... much like a Hollywood action movie. Big explosions, blood everywhere, kung fu fighting, the works. You don't see too many heroes getting their limbs hacked off in the movies, they are the heroes after all, the people the audience has an emotional investment in. They can get hurt, they can bleed, they can be captured and tortured just to show how bad the bad guys really are. Then they get up, say something witty, dismember a thousand goons with various household appliances, and in the next scene they have a clean shirt.

Personally, I don’t

want to lay the smackdown on the bad guy and be invincible.

Thankfully, I agree that:

That's probably the basic appeal of DnD game as presented in core. But if you'd prefer to play gritty and realistic, hey you're catered for!

Many years ago I was at a talk given by Terry Pratchett. Someone in the audience asked him why there wasn’t a Discworld rpg (at the time, there wasn’t). He said that he’d been approached by several companies, and had asked them to send him their ideas for rules. He claimed everyone had sent him a draft of their proposed combat system. He then went on to say that he’d recently been approached again, and that the new people had sent him a draft ‘running away system,’ which looked promising. He got a laugh, but he’d made his point. The rules for a discworld game should encourage players to play discworld characters.

I have a love of PenDragon (early editions anyway) You play a knight in Arthurs court. The original rules didn’t cater for anything else. Injuries took forever to heal. If you want to play something other than a knight, find another game. If you find the fact that you can only play a knight restrictive, find another game.

DnD isn’t my favourite game (not by a long margin) but it appears to be a lot more versatile than you (Emrikol) give it credit for. Play a few games without healing magic or potions, see how it works. You might need to alter your gaming style, but it should work.

 

[S'mon]

Using B/X D&D with magic healing often unavailable, it feels less like regular Disney-D&D and more like a Norse saga, with warriors going into battle and suffering great wounds that take days or even weeks to heal. It makes standard D&D dungeon crawling inadvisable, but is great for a more saga type game. For one thing, it makes the prospect of being wounded actually scary. It would work fine for an Arthurian/Pendragon type campaign with battles being more yearly than hourly.

 

[Kestrel]

Hey, D&D is D&D. Dont' question the RAW. D&D is a combat game, not a role playing game. Healing exists in such large quantities BECAUSE IT's EXPECTED that you will be fighting.. a LOT. If lots of fighting wasn't expected, for instance, if more "interaction" was required, there wouldn't be so much healing available. Heck in 3.x, healing become MORE available as the cleric started to get free-exchange for healing spells. If that isn't a slap in the face of "let's find another way" I don't know what is.

D&D is fun because of fighting not because of the role playing. THere're no "role-playing' mechanics in the game..there are however "healin' n' fightin' " mechanics. There isn't eveen any kind of attempt at balance (just liek 1E That's the way it should be.

As a friend of mine once said, look at the movie Aliens. Its a bug hunt and almost all combat. But there was a lot of roleplaying too.

A good group can roleplay in any system. YMMV of course.