No dailies, but also no healing surges? Would D&D be a better game this way?

[Gort]

healing surges was the most brilliant idea in 4e... why remove it?

Could you elaborate on why you like them so much?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This is inspired in part by the rumours surrounding daily powers in the new Essentials series, but I recognise that we know little about it so far:

I think that anyone who's GMed has occasionally had the problem where you've got a great long stretch of time, and it only really makes sense to have a single encounter in it - after all, it's not a great deal of fun to have constant encounters with lions and bandits and so forth when you're just trying to get from A to B.

One problem is that players who know or even just guess that they're not going to have many encounters can go "nova", blowing all of their daily powers in that one encounter, completely decimating it. Alternatively they take a long rest between every encounter, allowing them to do this constantly. Healing surges are a similar problem - it's very possible to build a party with appropriate gear and powers that can blow a vast number of healing surges every encounter, which again inflates the power of the party above and beyond what's assumed by the level system.

Now, there are ways to fight back against this - time limits preventing long rests, healing surge draining beasties, and so forth. But might it be simpler, if we were considering a rewrite of the current edition, to do away with daily powers and healing surges? Treat every encounter as an island, if you will, so that you can have one encounter in a section of play, or a dozen. Naturally daily magic item powers would have to go too.

It might also bring back to the fold those players who found it difficult to countenance being able to fire two arrows at a time only once per day - I was not one of these, but it was a complaint I heard.

I would suppose a downside might be that it would remove a layer of resource management from the game, but as I've mentioned earlier, it's a rather easily-solved management puzzle, and DMs kind of struggle with it at times.

It wouldn't remove "a layer" of resource management, it would remove ALL resource management, APs aside. The problem is this won't solve anything. Lets say you did this, then the daily resource is hit points, pure and simple. So now the one encounter someone has in a given day has a meaningless factor, the damage done to the party (until it becomes lethal anyway). The point is that a day with 5 encounters and a day with 1 encounter are just fundamentally different. They aren't similar days and the party won't use similar tactics.

I don't see the point. If you eliminate all ability of the players to 'nova' then all you've done is eliminated a whole dimension of strategy and fun for the players. Sure, it will make it easier for the DM, but that isn't the end-all of game system design. You could simply make all resources refresh on a short rest. That would just mean the party can nova EVERY encounter.

I think the answer flat out is if you know the party will be able to do a single encounter day, then you just plan the encounter with that in mind. Either make it a tough encounter or add some other dimension to it that makes it interesting or otherwise serve some purpose in the adventure.

If the 'lions and tigers and bears' type encounters are not interesting to the players or if this single hypothetical encounter is going to be trivial then just don't run a combat encounter. Honestly the design of 4e is to play significant encounters. Its not really a system that caters to trivial random annoyance encounters in a lot of ways besides just resource issues.

I always ask myself before creating an encounter if its actually a worthwhile encounter. If it isn't serving a purpose in the story in some fashion then I don't use it. There should really never be filler encounters and thus there should never be an issue with daily resources.

Now, there are situations where the players logically have a lot of control over the PACING of encounters. Say in a city where they can choose where and when to face their enemies. Again, you can anticipate them and make the encounters tough enough to be engaging, or you can grab control of pacing back from them with plot mechanisms. Or you can make them other types of encounters sometimes. It doesn't usually help the players a lot to be fully rested when they face an SC for example. It CAN, but its much less of a clear-cut thing.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Could you elaborate on why you like them so much?

There are a number of good things about Healing Surges. For one thing they serve as a good pool from which resources can be withdrawn to represent the wearing down of the character. You aren't in any immediately greater danger of death when you lose surges, but you are giving up a valuable resource. This allows for things like items that allow one character to spend an HS and allow someone else to heal.

HS also mean that instead of the healing capability of the party being vested in one 'cleric' that MUST be present for healing to happen, you have individual pools so that the players have to think more and yet one character isn't the golden treasure of the party that cannot ever be risked. Nobody wants to have to be the darn cleric! In previous editions there HAD to be a cleric, and it made little sense for that character to do much else but turtle up.

Finally it limits the total healing of the party. 3.x was infamous for higher level parties simply having infinite healing resources. All hit points turned into was the damage you could survive in a round or two. That is still SOMEWHAT true in 4e, but there's an ultimate limit.

So yeah, healing surges are a great advance.

 

[AllNamesRTaken]

I admit its late and my thoughts mught be ill worded but try and understand.

I have been playing around with the thought of simply exchanging the automatic full heal at x-rests, to a refill of surges and only allow expending surges if a power allows them to do so or during x-rests, second wind only useable in combat situations. This would allow the players full freedom during combats, removing the illogical recovry of meat and tissue every 5 mins if there is no magic of sorts (inc martial stuff) involved, increasing attrition as they know that even at a x-rest they can only heal if they still have surges. If you want to further increase attrition and make them feel more wounded, set a limit on the number of surges that can be expended during x-rests. This would make a heavy combat one day have possible bearing on combat situations following days, without removing any possibilities for the players.

Well, my 2 cents. What do you think about it? Would it fly?

And I know that loss of hp is some sort of strain measure, but I dont like it. When a poisonous giant rat of doom sinks his teeth into your shoulder, that just isnt strain... Thats a wound, or that poison is imaginative!

 

[UngainlyTitan]

I admit its late and my thoughts mught be ill worded but try and understand.

I have been playing around with the thought of simply exchanging the automatic full heal at x-rests, to a refill of surges and only allow expending surges if a power allows them to do so or during x-rests, second wind only useable in combat situations. This would allow the players full freedom during combats, removing the illogical recovry of meat and tissue every 5 mins if there is no magic of sorts (inc martial stuff) involved, increasing attrition as they know that even at a x-rest they can only heal if they still have surges. If you want to further increase attrition and make them feel more wounded, set a limit on the number of surges that can be expended during x-rests. This would make a heavy combat one day have possible bearing on combat situations following days, without removing any possibilities for the players.

Well, my 2 cents. What do you think about it? Would it fly?

And I know that loss of hp is some sort of strain measure, but I dont like it. When a poisonous giant rat of doom sinks his teeth into your shoulder, that just isnt strain... Thats a wound, or that poison is imaginative!

You see I have fundamental issues with the interpetation of hp as wound in any version of D&D and this has been trashed out on the forums before here ,here and here.
I think if you want to have combat on one day affect combat on subsequent days then mod the disease rules and if any character drops to below 0 in a fight they loose a healing surge after the fight due to the wound and need to improve their condition as per the disease rules to regain the surge.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Could you elaborate on why you like them so much?

It embraces the idea that hit points represent actual damage, but some kind of staying power... After a fight or when someone encourages you, you can get up on your feet.

But most important: healing scales with your hp.

In former editions, hit points also represent the amount of damage you can take. And having suffered about 50% hp loss should be about equal amount of injuieies taken. But a healing spell on a mage was far more efficient.

Actually the best thing which could have happened would be weapons not doing different amunts of damage, but the powers having its own damage die. So the Monk design would actually be the best design when you keep this concept of hp in mind.

 

[AllNamesRTaken]

You see I have fundamental issues with the interpetation of hp as wound in any version of D&D and this has been trashed out on the forums before here ,here and here.
I think if you want to have combat on one day affect combat on subsequent days then mod the disease rules and if any character drops to below 0 in a fight they loose a healing surge after the fight due to the wound and need to improve their condition as per the disease rules to regain the surge.

Ok ardoughter, if you ignore whether I like bloodied to be bloody tired or bloody hurt, do you believe that my changes are playable. I imagine they would be bringing the game a bit backwards towards 3.x in feel, but still letting everyone heal at the same pace, and without affecting powers or the general dynamics of fights.

 

[AllNamesRTaken]

It embraces the idea that hit points represent actual damage, but some kind of staying power... After a fight or when someone encourages you, you can get up on your feet.

But most important: healing scales with your hp.

In former editions, hit points also represent the amount of damage you can take. And having suffered about 50% hp loss should be about equal amount of injuieies taken. But a healing spell on a mage was far more efficient.

Actually the best thing which could have happened would be weapons not doing different amunts of damage, but the powers having its own damage die. So the Monk design would actually be the best design when you keep this concept of hp in mind.

Thats an intersting idea. If a rogue grabs a dagger or a rapier wouldnt matter, they still know where it hurts, that would give us some freedom in character generation on one side but maybe hamper us as you cant just train fullblade and make your cleric into a warrior cleric, meaning less freedom.

Interesting but I am not sure it would work for all classes and styles.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Ok ardoughter, if you ignore whether I like bloodied to be bloody tired or bloody hurt, do you believe that my changes are playable. I imagine they would be bringing the game a bit backwards towards 3.x in feel, but still letting everyone heal at the same pace, and without affecting powers or the general dynamics of fights.

I think the changes that you propose will really encourage a 5 min working day. Now if your players will ignore that and work on regardless then maybe but I think it is cludgey and not intune with 4e. I think in 3x terms healing surges are the hp equivalent not the actual hp which are an encounter resource.
That is why I think that knocking off healing surges for long term wounds would be a better route to go.

Edit: see later post for more thoughts.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

@AllNamesRTaken some further thoughts:

I just want to clarify what your objectives are;
It would appear to me that you want to recreate thet resource management of earlier games of D&D with respect to healing.
In those games hit point were lost in a combat and healing magic was applied to restore them. Typically the party takes an extended rest when they run out/low on the healing magic.
Now leaving aside the cases of wands in 3.x that made healing magic effectivly infinite, that resource limiter was the cleric and how many spells he has.
The problem with applying that to 4e are; the pure healing spells are daillies and most other in combat healing comes from combat spells that hit the enemy and allow someone to spend a healing surge.
So at the end of the frst fight it is likely that several characters are down more than a surge worth of hit points and there are no resources to bring them up to full.
If any daillies are left say they are used to top up the worst affected.
In this fight there are no dailies and the pcs have to save their second wind in case they are knocked to 0 and someone now has to heal check to trigger that second wind to get them back on their feet since the daillies are gone.

They are not going to survive a third fight against anything other than all minions. At 2 surges per daily and may be 4 surges of hp loss per PC it is going to take 8 to 10 days to get them back to fresh?
Is this what you want?