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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charles Rampant" data-source="post: 7073847" data-attributes="member: 32659">TL;DR: for just the proposed house rule, check the bolded bullet points below.Hey all, So another thread on the forum made me remember that I'd done some thinking on the commonly-accepted tendency (or "problem") in 5e for the party to only heal once someone is on the ground. Let me quickly summarise this:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The party doesn’t heal anyone until they are on 0 hp.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">This leads to ‘whack-a-mole’ healing, where someone falls over repeatedly and gets up, cheerfully soaking all the excess damage done since there is no -1 to -10 or instant-death-at-0hp rules anymore.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Solutions to whack-a-mole can include having monsters murder the downed character, or various nerfs to the Death Saves mechanic that range from mild to hellish. </li> </ul>Okay, so we’re all up to speed. I wanted to come at this from a different direction from that usually done, where the usual one is to nerf the ability of characters to be downed consequence-free. I myself tried out ‘going to 0hp gives a level of exhaustion’, and found that it did little to solve the problem, and indeed just felt punitive to the players; it didn’t make the game more fun, which is kind of my no. 1 requirement for a houserule. When I tried out this houserule, the players didn’t act differently because the underlying cause, as they had identified it, remained: healing spells are dreadful. The cleric in my Wednesday game - who kind of hates the class, and thus at level 17 deeply regrets picking it for a 1-20 no-multiclassing campaign - puts it thus: “I can heal the Paladin, for 3d8 of damage. Then the monster will hit him twice, each time doing 3d8 of damage, and he’ll go right back down again. What’s the point?” So, here is my suggestion, offered not as a means to get validation for my home game, since I have no intention of adopting them myself, but simply to broaden the debate: make combat healing better. Now, I deeply hate and despise all PCs - as my DM’s Guild membership dictates - so I do not intend this to be a straight buff. Instead, we will tinker with the overall healing of the party. 5e includes the ‘Hit Dice’ mechanic for healing damage on a short rest - a modified version of 4e’s ’Healing Surge’ mechanic, for those curious - and this Hit Dice mechanic really promotes not bothering with spells-for-healing. The party now has an additional resource which doesn’t require the Cleric to give up fun Call Lightning or Guiding Bolt spells, and which can be used at their own leisure. Healing Spells do very paltry amounts in comparison, when you consider the other potential uses of the spell slots, and so it is no surprise that Bards and Clerics rather resent casting them when the Barbarian could simply man up and use his hit dice. So the overall look, given very tentatively as I am definitely not a maths guy, is:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Healing spells do double their current healing, applied after all class and spell modifiers are applied. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Hit Dice can only be spent after a long rest, and only recharge between adventures.</li> </ul>It is worth noting that this is very likely to return us to 2e style ‘mandatory clerics’, who must accept being healers primarily, rather than front-line buffers and controllers. 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. However, I would observe that many posters seem to really want the party Cleric to cast more healing spells, so that might not be an issue. I hope that this is of interest.</blockquote>

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