Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 6292163" data-attributes="member: 37579">Right off the bat, this whole post was some well said stuff. Just a kudos for eloquence. Okay, I would argue that the healing surge and short rest mechanic are both elements of the same design goal: the focus on the encounter as the baseline for balance. So there are powers that recharge after every encounter and healing that is freely usable outside an encounter, both tied to the short rest. Arguing surges as being dependant on short rests is a little, well, chicken-and-the-egg. But, the short rest was really unneeded. Powers and healing effectively auto-recharged. Actually taking the 5 minutes and declaring a “short rest” was often unnecessary in practice, unless the party was deliberately moving straight to the next encounter or the DM imposing a time constraint (such as a chase). Given the focus both 4e and D&D5 put on extending the 5 Minute Workday, I do not think limiting healing surges was entirely focused around preventing an indefinite extension of the adventuring day. That was never really an issue. I am aware of that. I remember the fuss over the avenger at-will with free healing. Much of it seemed needless to me. More often than not, a lack of daily powers prompted a rest, as did ending the adventuring day at the end of a session to avoid having to track spent powers between sessions. But personal anecdotes and all. For all I know, every other group regularly had adventuring days that stretched over 3-4 sessions with dozens of encounters opposed to my 2-3. It almost seems like it was added solely for the sake of having one more resource to manage, complexity for complexity’s sake.Right. Healing could have easily been based on the class’ Hit Dice, or been similar to what D&D5 is doing. The static 1/4 was likely done to increase consistency and remove randomness. As the focus was on tactical play, the less randomness in the game the better. The only randomness in combat was the attack rolls and damage, with most other things being consistent and predictable.Similar to how the board games did away with rolling damage and Dungeon Command did away with attack rolls. It's very likely, had 5e evolved from 4e, there'd be no attack rolls and damage would be assumed, because missing is "boring" and feels like you've wasted your turn, and because action heroes should never miss.</blockquote>

Verification