Forked Thread: Dealing with Healing Surges

[Daniel D. Fox]

Forked from: Dealing with Healing Surges

Hello

So I'm running a campaign right now and it seems like the group dose not fear any monster due to the amount of healing surges they have. I have been taking them out with harsh weather yet still they seem to have a ton even thought they are losing healing surges and not regaining them.

Is the only way to deal with this hit them with multiple combats a day? If so I feel like I'm in trouble because I enjoy playing a more urban style game and have normally only one fight in a campaign day.

Any advice you guys may have to make the fights a bit more scary would be great.

Thanks a lot.

I addressed this with these houserules: http://deismaar.pbwiki.com/f/AGoodNightsRest.doc

Admin, can you send this over to the houserule forum. Thanks in advance!

-d.

 

[jeffh]

Forked from: Dealing with Healing Surges



I addressed this with these houserules: http://deismaar.pbwiki.com/f/AGoodNightsRest.doc

Admin, can you send this over to the houserule forum. Thanks in advance!

-d.

What is the purpose of these house rules? What precisely are you trying to accomplish with them?

As far as I can see, this reintroduces the 5-minute adventuring day (at least at low levels), with no appreciable upside. But perhaps I am judging them by the wrong standard; it's hard to know whether they accomplish your goals without knowing what those goals are.

I do agree with the great majority of posters in the thread you forked from that the original poster in that thread has misdiagnosed the problems he's having. To the extent that they are problems in the first place, his issues stem from effectively making dailies and action points into encounter powers; surges have little or nothing to do with it.

 

[Daniel D. Fox]

I am sorry, I should have stressed the design intention -

1) Reduce the amount of "heal up and move" attributed to D&D. Far too much gloss with 4e, and not enough grit.

2) Simplify the Death and Dying rules.

3) I want combat to be deadly and gritty with limited healing surge resources, therefore enforcing players to build their NPC network and not take the fastest approach to deal with issues.

4) I wanted to give out more Action Points. 1 milestone means two sessions of gaming (two weeks), and just isn't enough to do "cool" stuff with. So, when players bring Tasty Treats (any snack that all players can share at the gaming table), they refresh 2 Action Points during an extended rest instead of 1.

5) Scalability of Healing Surges based on level and direct benefit to high Constitution. Basically, "uncap" the maximum amount of surges starting at 1st level, and introducing a sense of danger.

6) Erase the static (make a Heal 16 to cure disease sort of stuff) and use scaling difficulty classes (hence the use of moderate, hard and easy skill checks based on level from the revised FAQ WotC released).

 

[jeffh]

@1: Okay, if you want to accomplish this, you have... at low levels. It's not clear you've done so at higher levels, though, where it is possible, and eventually inevitable, for characters to have more surges than currently.

@2: Not clear to me that you've done this.

@3: You haven't done anything that actually reduces the number of surges available per combat, though! (Apart from the very harsh loss of all surges from going below 0.) This is similar to an error that was repeatedly pointed out in the other thread (and quite egregious in the OP of that thread) - grossly overestimating how much the number of surges available per day affects individual battles.

@4: I really, really dislike rewarding the characters for out-of-game things. It also seems to fly in the face of the gritty feel you want to otherwise enforce - it's an Order of the Stick touch in an otherwise Shadowrun world. Also - you only have one encounter per session?

@5: Not sure I understand. By being tied to your hit point total, they already scale with level. I don't see the point of magnifying this effect.

@6: This alone is a goal I can wholeheartedly agree with in the first place, considering I've done similar things.

In short, I not only question some of your goals, but on the whole, I don't think you've chosen particularly good means of achieving them.

Also, what do you do about characters that have zero surges under these rules (very much a mathematical possibility)?