Hit points as luck

[Celebrim]

I don't think it's horribly unbalance good. You balance by the spell (and the level it's being cast at), rather than by the character level of the healer.

Suppose a balanced 1st level spell did 1d8 damage. Would the same spell be balanced at 1d8/character level? Well, this is doubly better than that spell, in that healing is more powerful in D&D than damage (unlike say MtG) and the spell is scalling by the level of a the target. So imagine a damaging spell that allows a 1st level caster to do 20d8 damage to a 20th level character. Do you see the problem now?

 

[jian]

Suppose a balanced 1st level spell did 1d8 damage. Would the same spell be balanced at 1d8/character level? Well, this is doubly better than that spell, in that healing is more powerful in D&D than damage (unlike say MtG) and the spell is scalling by the level of a the target. So imagine a damaging spell that allows a 1st level caster to do 20d8 damage to a 20th level character. Do you see the problem now?

I think the question as originally posed is more along the lines of “if the original spell heals 1d8 + caster’s level in HP, is it more powerful or unbalanced if the house rule is that it now heals 1d8 + recipient’s level in HP?”

That is a slightly more difficult question. It makes a 1st level cleric’s healing effect on high level characters much more useful - so if your high level party has a low level cleric hireling or ally, then they’re much more useful to you than under the original rule. On the other hand, it makes the high level PC’s healing of their lower level allies less powerful. It makes no difference to PCs healing each other if they’re at the same level, of course.

 

[Celebrim]

I think the question as originally posed is more along the lines of “if the original spell heals 1d8 + caster’s level in HP, is it more powerful or unbalanced if the house rule is that it now heals 1d8 + recipient’s level in HP?”

I made the example a bit extreme in order to make it clear, but the answer when you tone down the scaling is still the same and for the same reasons.

That is a slightly more difficult question.

Only because by making the advantage smaller you make the problem smaller.

It makes a 1st level cleric’s healing effect on high level characters much more useful - so if your high level party has a low level cleric hireling or ally, then they’re much more useful to you than under the original rule. On the other hand, it makes the high level PC’s healing of their lower level allies less powerful. It makes no difference to PCs healing each other if they’re at the same level, of course.

Probably not. You see most low-level healing is level capped anyway. So for example in 1e it was just flat 1d8 with no bonus for being high level. In 3e it was 1d+8 + 1/class level but that was capped at 1d8+5 to avoid a first level spell being too good. And in 5e it is 4+1d4 presumably to avoid 'whiffing' but again not scaled. If you have it with something like 1d8 + 1/target character level but cap it at +5 than you are really minimizing the change in such a way that all your analysis above just sort of falls apart. The range of caster to target interaction changes gets really small and it "makes no difference" generally at all, but then if it makes no difference then are you in any real sense scaling the healing with the recipient's character level? More to the point, are you really embracing the reality that under the Gygaxian model if a given would represent X damage at 1st level then the same wound at 10th level represents nearly 10 times as much damage? If you were really trying to model that reality in any fashion and make a meaningful change to how healing worked, then surely you would do something like "heals 1d2 hit points per character level of the recipient".

But even that seemingly innocuous level of scaling shows how bad that sort of scaling would be for the game's playability. Now the healing is too trivial at low level and yet too extreme and easy and resource efficient at high level. Making it 1d8 + target's character level makes the imbalance a little less noticeable, but it's still there. The game has moved to cap really efficient scaling for good reasons. There is a reason for example 3e capped the scaling on fireball at 10d6.

And this isn't even getting into issues like how would be price magical healing when the amount of healing doesn't scale with the power of the effect but the power of the recipient. Imagine if fireball worked this way: 1d6 damage per character level of the target. It would be obvious why that was busted, right?