Help! My party has no healer!

[Joshua Randall]

The greatest part of a pen and paper roleplaying is that players and DM can just adjust everyithing so that it works. And I really mean everything.

Absolutely.

One of the best campaigns I ever ran consisted of one-and-a-half players (one guy was frequently absent), whose characters were a cleric and a ranger. (This was 3e.)

So yeah, they had healing, but no arcane magic and no social skill monkey. As DM, I simply had to ensure that adventures didn't depend solely on casting wizards spells or making +25 Bluff checks.

 

[Shin Okada]

As already pointed out by some others, using a Companion Character (DMG2) is usually the best way to go.

Trust me, even at paragon tier, making and using a Companion Character is easy. And in my experience, making a useful Companion Leader is relatively easier than making companion characters of other roles. They are most stable.

Well, maybe aside from Ardent (who don't has encounter powers and thus not supported by current Companion Character rule), and Shaman (which relies largely on Call Spirit Companion, which is a class feature), all the other leaders work well as a companion character.

A companion PC is somewhat inferior to PCs. In case of Companion Leaders, they don't heal additional HPs when letting someone spend a healing surge and such. But they have at least as much HPs and healing surges. And their non-AC-defenses are basically quite good (level +13 for all the NADs). So they are relatively tough.

And, if you still want to let 4 PCs adventure only by themselves, how about giving them, say, Divine Boon Pelor's Sun Blessing (DMG2)? If all the 4 members have this boon, they each can let an ally spend a healing surge once/day. L13+ versions even have some bonus HPs regained.

 

[Celestian]

Didn't get to read every post but I am surprised no one mentioned hirelings/henchmen. Yeah it's and old school feature but in this case it's probably better than forcing someone to re-roll or to adjust your encounters for them because they have no healer.

 

[Shin Okada]

Didn't get to read every post but I am surprised no one mentioned hirelings/henchmen. Yeah it's and old school feature but in this case it's probably better than forcing someone to re-roll or to adjust your encounters for them because they have no healer.

Companion Character (DMG2) is the henchman rule in 4.0e. It is quite nice, indeed.

 

[Tuft]

Don´t ever rebuild characters or even stop playing them, just because a "slot" is missing. There are always workarounds.The greatest part of a pen and paper roleplaying is that players and DM can just adjust everyithing so that it works. And I really mean everything.

Exactly. Part of the DM's job is making up encounters appropriate to the party at hand.

If you have a party of Nuke-Armed Mobile Infantry, you give them encounters of one level. If you have a party of Teletubbies, you give them encounters of another. If, at the stroke of midnight, your Mobile Infantry turns into Teletubbies, you adapt and change your encounters. You do exactly the same thing if your suddenly realize that your Teletubbies really are Mobile Infantry in disguise.


I played a lot of the MMO City of Heroes at one time. Of course, with an MMO there was no GM, but there was a mechanism for the party leader to raise and lower the difficulty level of the in-mission encounters. With pick-up parties both party composition and player competence could vary wildly over time, and a good party leader used that in-game mechanism to always set an appropriate challenge for the party at hand. A bad party leader, on the other hand, usually dialed everything to the max, and then blamed the lack of available H3AL0RZ (or their competence if present) when inevitably the Brown Dwarf Star hit the Air Circulation Device...

 

[UngeheuerLich]

When i said, every encounter should be tailored so that an unoptimized group can defeat it with unoptimized tactics... i also didn´t say, you should level up encounters on the fly...

you can do that on occassion, but it should not be your standard behaviour.
Instead of levelling up or down encounters, you should include terrain players can use to their advantage, bad tactics of the enemy like wandering around alone or in small teams, or have them react a little bit dumber than possible when players try to trick them.

Don´t adapt your total number of enemies to heavily on the power of the players, but try to break them up in smaller chunks, if players are playing smartly.
The only combats you should really tone down are those which the party can´t avoid. Everything else should just include possibilitites for your players to reduce the difficulty by bringing in gereat ideas.

 

[Mika]

Really one extra point of healing makes that much a difference?

That's one extra point of healing for everyone within range of the banner whenever anyone within range of the banner spends a healing surge. If you have a party of five adventurers, every one of them uses his second wind, and every one of them is within range of the banner, that is five extra points of healing for everyone over the course of that battle. If you have an oversized group, the advantage is even greater. If you have an undersized group, this item is far less useful.

Also, if a character goes down (dying) before using his Second Wind, that one point of healing will stabilize him and restore him to consciousness. That means that you don't have to resort to a Heal check or a special power to induce him to use his Second Wind.