D&D 5E Healing in 5e

[discosoc]

Something I've been thinking about as an alternative would be for healing spells to do minimal healing, but allow the target to spent whatever HD they wanted when they are healed. So like, Cure Wounds heals the warrior for 1d8 and let's that warrior spend whatever HD he has available immediately. Make Cure Wounds a bonus action so that the healer can be doing something offensive, and it might be pretty balanced.

In combat heals would have the potential for being huge and life-saving, but at the expense of down time healing.

 

[Corwin]

Yeah. We are currently writing up our own house rules for the next campaign. A little gritter. We also changed healing spells to instead allow the recipient to spend a/some HD plus the caster's ability bonus.

 

[Tony Vargas]

• Healing spells do double their current healing, applied after all class and spell modifiers are applied.
• Hit Dice can only be spent after a long rest, and only recharge between adventures.

It is worth noting that this is very likely to return us to 2e style ‘mandatory clerics’,

Probably true.

who must accept being healers primarily, rather than front-line buffers and controllers.

Possibly not, it depends on how much that healing burden can be shifted, either by having two or more healers in the party - Druids, Bards and/or Paladins as well as Clerics - or by shortening the adventuring day. It'll mean more healing spells cast out of combat, and it'll likely mean fewer short rests. So expect class & encounter balance to shift.

The party's ability to take on encounters over the course of the day will become more dependent upon daily spell slots (since none of the healers recharge much healing or slots on a short rest), if healers choose to use their spell slots aggressively in combat, and to provide healing out of combat, they'll burn through them quickly, requiring shorter adventuring days for the party to continue. So even though it's a power-up to spellcasting, it might not much power up those classes, and, similarly, though it might mean a greater dependence on them, the burden won't necessarily be felt by them, exclusively, the whole party will be affected as pacing changes. Classes with mostly-at-will and/or mostly short-rest-recharge resources may be making fewer or less-important contributions over the course of shorter days. The long-rest-recharge healers will be driving pacing, but that's not really agency so much as necessity, so they might be better or worse off or not particularly different in the final analysis. Classes with significant long-rest-recharge resources that can't be used for healing, though, may find themselves with a glut of those resources, and be able to outperform to a degree.

After all, 5e introduced the Hit Dice and Death Saving Throw mechanics expressly to avoid mandatory clerics and boring 'deadtime' in games for the downed players.

Well, 5e retained overnight healing, heal-from-0, death saves, Healing Word, and Healing Surges (bowdlerized & with serial numbers filed off), perhaps for those reasons - certainly for some compelling reason, since it must have seemed retaining /anything/ from 4e risked continued edition warring.

Fast combat was also a major goal of 5e, and that means having offense tuned fairly high relative to toughness, so that one side or the other goes down fairly quickly, in case that side is a PC, in-combat healing is needed, and that's the Cleric (or Druid or Bard or even Paladin), being 'mandatory' again (or, rather, still).

 

[Prism]

Nothing sucks more than rolling low on a healing spell.

Except for rolling low on your hit dice when you level up - that hurts!