D&D 5E Healing Word "HD" House Rule

[Steampunkette]

So... Here's my take:

Whack-a-Mole gameplay might be the "Most Efficient" for the purposes of spending spell slots... but it's also the absolute worst for any kind of narrative structure. Unfortunately, due to the way healing works in 5e, the average healing spell only restores -about- 1 hit's worth of damage (assuming you roll well), which makes keeping characters up into a full time job for anyone who possesses healing magic.

The answer isn't to remove the whack-a-mole-ability of Healing Word. The answer is to increase the overall function of healing while greater incentivizing keeping player characters upright.

So! Healing Word and Cure Wounds provide their normal amount of healing -and- allow the target to spend hit dice based on the spell slot used as a reaction, allowing a character to gain significantly more hit points than the average attack deals.

But! Failed Death Saving Throws do not reset, and instead persist until the end of your next long rest. So letting someone go down multiple times becomes a serious risk of losing a party member before you get the -chance- to heal them on their 3rd or 4th down of the adventuring day.

 

[FireLance]

If it does not work on unconscious characters, this spell is basically useless. It is already limited by slots. Do your players enjoy spending long stretches of combat unconscious ?

If it does not work on unconscious characters, the players simply need to be sure to use it before any character goes unconscious.

If players don't enjoy spending long stretches of combat unconscious, it seems to me that the DM should be running easier encounters.

A party that has no access to in-combat healing should be just as viable as a party that does. In-combat healing should be beneficial, but not a requirement. What this means is that for the majority of fights, none of the PCs should be dropping to 0 hit points. In fact, if the DM runs mostly Medium difficulty encounters, the game tells you this should be the case!

As a matter of personal taste, I think that the in-combat casting of healing word or cure wounds should only be really useful about once in every eight or more fights, so in my games, the impact of healing word only triggering the use of Hit Dice versus cure wounds providing healing without the need to use Hit Dice is really quite small. And as a 4E fan, I'm happy that the house rule brings healing word and cure wounds closer to their 4E roots/incarnation. And isn't the entire point of house rules to enable DMs to tweak the game however they want?

 

[clearstream]

So... Here's my take:

Whack-a-Mole gameplay might be the "Most Efficient" for the purposes of spending spell slots... but it's also the absolute worst for any kind of narrative structure. Unfortunately, due to the way healing works in 5e, the average healing spell only restores -about- 1 hit's worth of damage (assuming you roll well), which makes keeping characters up into a full time job for anyone who possesses healing magic.

The answer isn't to remove the whack-a-mole-ability of Healing Word. The answer is to increase the overall function of healing while greater incentivizing keeping player characters upright.

So! Healing Word and Cure Wounds provide their normal amount of healing -and- allow the target to spend hit dice based on the spell slot used as a reaction, allowing a character to gain significantly more hit points than the average attack deals.

But! Failed Death Saving Throws do not reset, and instead persist until the end of your next long rest. So letting someone go down multiple times becomes a serious risk of losing a party member before you get the -chance- to heal them on their 3rd or 4th down of the adventuring day.

Yup, I've been thinking along those lines, too. Perhaps the right solution is to persist death saving throw fails to the next rest (or long rest, but I suspect rest would be enough). I agree about healing being too close to one hit's worth of HP. Have you played any game sessions with your proposed rule? It looks like it has potential.

 

[Steampunkette]

Yup, I've been thinking along those lines, too. Perhaps the right solution is to persist death saving throw fails to the next rest (or long rest, but I suspect rest would be enough). I agree about healing being too close to one hit's worth of HP. Have you played any game sessions with your proposed rule? It looks like it has potential.

I haven't. Since I started work on Project Chronicle I've actually backburnered the game I was running indefinitely. But it's certainly a rule suggestion I'll be putting into the setting once I have a name for it.

 

[Lyxen]

If it does not work on unconscious characters, the players simply need to be sure to use it before any character goes unconscious.

Sure, but that makes it highly inefficient, even more than standard combat healing.

If players don't enjoy spending long stretches of combat unconscious, it seems to me that the DM should be running easier encounters.

The thing is that I'm happy with the game as it is, so my point is just that I don't want to start a string of modifications for no purpose. My point here is that once you start modifying something, you have to deal with consequences all down the line, I'm happy with harder encounters and easy healing, it's the spirit of the game and in particular of 5e.

A party that has no access to in-combat healing should be just as viable as a party that does. In-combat healing should be beneficial, but not a requirement. What this means is that for the majority of fights, none of the PCs should be dropping to 0 hit points. In fact, if the DM runs mostly Medium difficulty encounters, the game tells you this should be the case!

Except that doing this requires you to run a high number of encounters per day, which is not the way most people play. At our tables, we are probably even less combat-oriented than most tables, with very often no encounter, and 1 or 2, 3 at the very most for days in which we have encounters. But most tables will not have that many encounters. Forcing people to change the whole way of playing as a measure against a fairly simple spell that has its own limitations seems a bit extreme to me...

As a matter of personal taste, I think that the in-combat casting of healing word or cure wounds should only be really useful about once in every eight or more fights

As long as it's your personal taste it's probably fine for your games as long as you are the DM and your players are on the same line, but honestly I don't think that lots of people are that extreme.

Although honestly, at our tables, we are not even making that kind of statistics, what is important is that people have fun, that sometimes there are lots of healing words, other times none at all, but it's certainly not abused and we've had entire campaigns without combat healing at all...

, so in my games, the impact of healing word only triggering the use of Hit Dice versus cure wounds providing healing without the need to use Hit Dice is really quite small. And as a 4E fan, I'm happy that the house rule brings healing word and cure wounds closer to their 4E roots/incarnation. And isn't the entire point of house rules to enable DMs to tweak the game however they want?

Oh sure, I'm just explaining why these modifications would certainly not suit our DMs and actually probably not many other tables, too many consequences on playstyle down the line.

 

[billd91]

So! Healing Word and Cure Wounds provide their normal amount of healing -and- allow the target to spend hit dice based on the spell slot used as a reaction, allowing a character to gain significantly more hit points than the average attack deals.

But! Failed Death Saving Throws do not reset, and instead persist until the end of your next long rest. So letting someone go down multiple times becomes a serious risk of losing a party member before you get the -chance- to heal them on their 3rd or 4th down of the adventuring day.

I like the idea of a player being able to opt to spend hit dice to boost the healing effect of a healing word/cure wounds spell. I think it can lead to interesting choices between long term and short term resources.

But as for failed death saves persisting, I'm not sure I'd go that far. It's pretty easy to accrue failed saves, particularly if a monster drops the PC in the middle of an attack sequence and opts to worry the character for 2 death saves right off the bat. And in big fights with boss monsters, it could potentially be a fast death spiral. I'd bet that Critical Role campaign 1 would have TPKed a couple of times under that sort of rule.

 

[Steampunkette]

I like the idea of a player being able to opt to spend hit dice to boost the healing effect of a healing word/cure wounds spell. I think it can lead to interesting choices between long term and short term resources.

But as for failed death saves persisting, I'm not sure I'd go that far. It's pretty easy to accrue failed saves, particularly if a monster drops the PC in the middle of an attack sequence and opts to worry the character for 2 death saves right off the bat. And in big fights with boss monsters, it could potentially be a fast death spiral. I'd bet that Critical Role campaign 1 would have TPKed a couple of times under that sort of rule.

1) To be a death spiral it needs to make it easier to fall. Such as debuffs to AC or Max HP, so you get hit more often or can't defend yourself.
2) The rules are meant to be used together.
3) The intention is to both make healing more powerful and players use it more often to stop whack-a-mole gameplay through behavioral changes.

Yeah, someone on Critical Role might've died if you applied one of these two rules retroactively. Having them both at the outset, though, would've changed the way the Critters played the game to avoid that outcome.

 

[Fanaelialae]

So... Here's my take:

Whack-a-Mole gameplay might be the "Most Efficient" for the purposes of spending spell slots... but it's also the absolute worst for any kind of narrative structure. Unfortunately, due to the way healing works in 5e, the average healing spell only restores -about- 1 hit's worth of damage (assuming you roll well), which makes keeping characters up into a full time job for anyone who possesses healing magic.

I would argue that keeping characters up is more than a full time job in 5e, unless we assume that only one hit lands each round.

If we instead assume that a character might be hit 2+ times in a round, it becomes evident that a single healer cannot possibly output the amount of healing necessary to keep an ally standing when presuming less than ideal circumstances. The counter to that is that sometimes an ally might not be hit at all, but due to RNG we cannot presume to know in any given round whether it will be the former or the latter.

Your proposed solution does admittedly address this to a degree. However, I think you might need to examine how HD are gained if you implement it. The rapid scaling of HD (1 to 20) is not ideally suited to such a change IMO. I think that, without changing HD scaling, your proposal is likely to push low level parties towards the 5MWD (with the alternative being TPK resulting from Exhaustion penalties).

 

[Blue]

Once you can upcast, Cure Wounds is much more efficient in terms of HPs restored.

But, efficiency needs to be evaluated not just in number of HPs, but in the boolean "character up/down" which is the real concern. And for that, it is almost more efficient to take X damage, have a character drop, and then heal them Y from zero to bring them up. Because healing Y (not from zero), then they take X, will still often end up a character down. Because any healing from zero will get a character back up, Healing Word seems much more efficient because of the caster action economy and range. Remember that the range may make it into a "this round" vs. "next round" which gives back a whole action to the downed character.

If (a) healing from zero didn't have extra efficiency built in (i.e. we had negative HPs), and (b) damage was in scale to healing, then Cure Wounds would be well balanced vs. Healing Word. However neither of those are desirable - the first leaves players bored because they are down, the second makes combat stretch and moves us back to requiring a healer role.

 

[Blue]

If players don't enjoy spending long stretches of combat unconscious, it seems to me that the DM should be running easier encounters.

This doesn't follow in the slightest.

It is perfectly acceptable to want drag-out difficult combats with real tension and risk of death, but also not want players to sit out bored. And that's something that you should solve for at a game design level instead of making every DM fight to hit that point. For a swingy combat like D&D mechanics provide that's not even really on the table for that to be DM-only as a goal.

A party that has no access to in-combat healing should be just as viable as a party that does. In-combat healing should be beneficial, but not a requirement. What this means is that for the majority of fights, none of the PCs should be dropping to 0 hit points. In fact, if the DM runs mostly Medium difficulty encounters, the game tells you this should be the case!

I agree that in-combat healing should not be a requirement. I disagree strongly with any implication that D&D is geared towards not dropping players or that is a universal DM goal. They give different encounter difficulties besides Medium on purpose.

As a matter of personal taste, I think that the in-combat casting of healing word or cure wounds should only be really useful about once in every eight or more fights, so in my games, the impact of healing word only triggering the use of Hit Dice versus cure wounds providing healing without the need to use Hit Dice is really quite small. And as a 4E fan, I'm happy that the house rule brings healing word and cure wounds closer to their 4E roots/incarnation. And isn't the entire point of house rules to enable DMs to tweak the game however they want?

Your personal taste is valid. And the game can be played like that if the DM aims for it. That does not in the slightest make it the only valid way to play, and the game should and does support other modes of play as well.