D&D 5E On Healing and Broccoli

[ZombieRoboNinja]

I've been thinking a bit about healing in 5e, and I've noticed that there's a tendency (especially, it seems, among 4e fans) to treat it like a side of vegetables you're served with dinner. Nobody likes it, the theme goes, but it's part of a balanced meal, so they try to mix our peas in with our mashed potatoes (heals as pseudo-minor-actions so you can attack in the same round). JUST healing would be too boring!

Well, as a vegetarian will tell you, vegetables themselves don't have to be gross; you just need to stop treating them like an afterthought.

Playing a cleric using Cure X Wounds to heal is like a wizard whose only spell is Magic Missile: you auto-hit a single target at any range and just roll some dice to see how much damage/healing you do. Pretty boring! That's why the wizard gets a wide variety of attacks, with different ranges, areas of effect, saving throws, damage types, rider effects, and so on.

Now, granted, not everybody wants or needs that. There should probably still be a basic option so that warpriests can keep tossing off Cure spells between attacks. But all those people who like to play healers might enjoy seeing a broader variety of heals in the game. To my mind, it's those more varied heals that should be domain spells for the Lifebringer domain. Cure X Wounds should be relegated to Channel Divinity so that all clerics can toss it in on top of a melee attack or orison.

Here are a couple ideas off the top of my head:

Rejuvenation: Choose a target within 50 feet. That target receives 1d6 healing now and another 1d6 healing at the begin of each of your turns as long as you maintain concentration. Additionally, as long as the spell is maintained the target has advantage on mental saving throws (Int/Wis/Cha).

Bloodlust: You sing a song of blood and battle that rings in your allies' ears. As long as you maintain concentration, all allies within earshot heal 1d6 hp each time they deal a critical hit or kill an enemy.

Guardian Angel: The next time your target takes damage, they immediately heal 2d6 damage.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Good idea, and something that should be learned from 4E. Healing can be interesting; for clerics, consider spells or actions that heal allies as a secondary effect (for example, pulling energy from a target, causing damage, and diverting it to an ally, healing damage).

 

[Aloïsius]

Good idea, and something that should be learned from 4E. Healing can be interesting; for clerics, consider spells or actions that heal allies as a secondary effect (for example, pulling energy from a target, causing damage, and diverting it to an ally, healing damage).

As long as it does not seems silly, like many 4e power did...

In the other "healing" thread, I talked about the lack of lasting wound in D&D (and hope that a module will cover that). Such a module would logically imply skill challenge-like rules for healing wounds outside of combat, or for stabilizing a character during combat. It just need to add tension (that is, uncertainty) to the game, rather than being an auto-success.

 

[GameDoc]

I like the idea in the other healing thread of your deity or domain dictating what you have to do to heal. A war deity only lets you heal if you smite an enemy, a fire deity requires you burn an offering, a deity of wine requires you to take a swig, etc.

 

[MoonSong]

Good idea, and something that should be learned from 4E. Healing can be interesting; for clerics, consider spells or actions that heal allies as a secondary effect (for example, pulling energy from a target, causing damage, and diverting it to an ally, healing damage).

I think you are missing the point. The whole point isn't to have spells that do soemthing and then heal as an afterhtought, the whole point is to have spells that heal on different and interesting ways. Healing should be the primary target of healing spells, not some kind of rider that can even be lost or ignored.

 

[kerleth]

I think you are absolutely right. Put the options for the "pure healer" in right next to the strike and heal option. Great ideas on how to make healing more interesting.

 

[ferratus]

Some people like playing a healing cleric of Pelor. Some people want to worship Wee Jas or Olidammara, and healing isn't really a part of that, but you have to have turning undead and healing because that's what everyone expects a cleric to do. I have seen pressure for the cleric to do his healing duty in every edition, and even in the last playtest when a player managed to create a necromancer cleric without any healing at all.

Making healing more tactically interesting would certainly help, with a variety of touch, ranged, and buffing spells. My wife liked playing a 4e cleric because she got to roll high numbers healing, which was just as good to her as rolling high damage. I think that you can also redesign a lot of spells so that they do healing as part of their spells. Druids can have healing as a plausible side effect of many other spells (barkskin could also give you roots that draw healing magic from the earth for example).

I also really like the idea of getting domain specific slots and then turning them into healing magic when they are cast (as opposed to burning them off before you cast as with spontaneous divine healing). The God rewards his mortal with what he needs (healing, removing curses etc.) for casting spells related to that god's sphere of influence. Then the cleric gets to play, and he has healing spells for when the party actually needs it (at the end of the day when they are getting worn down).

Those are all good ways to get clerics to eat their vegetables. Of course, making other classes have some degree of "healing" is good too. There is a reason the warlord was so popular.

 

[bbjore]

I like the ideas in this thread a lot, and I agree, one of the problems with healing is that it is boring, and there isn't a lot of choice in it. A problem comes up (low hp), and it's one of the party member's job to bite that bullet and spend their turn fixing it.

My concern when you tie it to other stuff though, is that the need to heal only comes up a couple of times during a fight, and when that occurs is largely outside of the cleric's control. By tying healing to those other mechanics, you are forcing the player to use those mechanics when healing becomes necessary. It'd be nice to see the solution not only make healing more interesting than just roll and heal, but also provide nearly as many interesting choices on the part of the person playing the cleric as they would have if they didn't have to heal on their turn.

That's the strength of the do it as an essentially free action method. The cleric player still has access to their full list of regularly interesting decisions on their turn, and aren't limited to just those options that can provide healing.

There's a lot of ways to do this, I just think it is important that not only do you want to make healing more than a dice roll, but you want to provide enough options on the player's turn that they are able to make interesting decisions when it's time to heal.

 

[pemerton]

My concern when you tie it to other stuff though, is that the need to heal only comes up a couple of times during a fight, and when that occurs is largely outside of the cleric's control. By tying healing to those other mechanics, you are forcing the player to use those mechanics when healing becomes necessary.

If I've understood you correctly, I think you've hit on the real reason why healing is "boring" (for many, at least): it is fundamentally reactive rather than active, so if you are playing a pure healer your choices of action are dictated primarily by what the NPCs and monsters do, rather than by your own round-by-round decisions about how to engage the situation via your PC.

Making healing more fancy and intricate won't solve that problem.

For example, consider these suggestions from the OP:

Rejuvenation: Choose a target within 50 feet. That target receives 1d6 healing now and another 1d6 healing at the begin of each of your turns as long as you maintain concentration. Additionally, as long as the spell is maintained the target has advantage on mental saving throws (Int/Wis/Cha).

Bloodlust: You sing a song of blood and battle that rings in your allies' ears. As long as you maintain concentration, all allies within earshot heal 1d6 hp each time they deal a critical hit or kill an enemy.

Guardian Angel: The next time your target takes damage, they immediately heal 2d6 damage.

Considered in the abstract these all seem like reasonable suggestions. And in a formal sense they are not reactive - the cleric casts them in advance and (in the case of the first two) sustains them.

But the burden of "reactiveness" hasn't been eliminated, it's just been shifted elsewhere: because you have to commit resources in advance to provide a benefit that is purely hypothetical until your enemies act (and act successfully), you run the risk of choosing the wrong target, or the wrong combat, for your spell.

4e does have healing-type powers that might be seen as having a similar sort of character, namely, powers and other abilities that confer temporary hit points. But 4e is built around the assumption that, in combat, the PCs will be hit and hit often. Whereas D&Dnext seems to be moving back to a more classic D&D approach, contemplating combats in which the PCs, if they are a little bit lucky, won't be hit at all. (And that's before fighters deploy their dice for parrying.)

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Personally, i like my veggies, and enjoyed the role of healer.

That said, the whole "my god doesn't grant me healing/undead turning" option was one of the reasons I liked 2Ed Priests more than any other iteration.

In 3.5Ed, there were more & more interesting options as the game grew. I'm particularly fond of CompDiv's Sacred Healing Feat for one- burn Turn Undeads to give everything in a 60' burst Fast Healing 3 for (1+ Cha bonus)rds. Very handy at all levels.

All I will say of 4Ed healing is that, to me, non-healing classes had too much of it, and having to burn a healing surges to power healing magic items left me stone cold.