D&D 5E On the healing options in the 5e DMG

[Azzy]

No, it's not trivial. The healing rules were one the main reasons I didn't play 4e.

How fast your character heals while you and your buddies play pretend isn't the definition of trivial?

 

[RotGrub]

How fast your character heals while you and your buddies play pretend isn't the definition of trivial?

playing pretend is what the game is all about. The game is a product of your imagination. It isn't trival to have your imagination ruined with a cheesy game mechanic. I know there are some people who don't mind it, but I do.

 

[MechaPilot]

One could have always ignored the overnight healing in 4e if one were so inclined. The only thing that stops someone from doing ignoring overnight healing in 4e is the same thing that stops someone from ignoring overnight healing in 5e: nothing.

In fact, ignoring the overnight healing may have improved some people's play experience: if you thought there was too much healing in 4e, restoring surges overnight while ignoring overnight healing would have certainly reduced the amount of healing available (because players would have certainly used those surges to get as close to back up to full as possible.

Of course, that same nothing was also the only thing preventing people from halving the surge value or halving the number of surges available per day or ignoring second wind.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

Just to weigh in on some of the general discussion about roles and healing...

In prior editions (except 4e) the effectiveness hit the party would take from not having a full healer was greater than it is in 5e.

You basically have had 4 traditional D&D roles (and I'm going to disagree with the other poster on what they were): melee tank, healer, mage, "thief" (for lack of a better term). If you were missing any of those roles in your party, you would seriously suffer in a standard campaign. It would create an unbalanced party. There is nothing wrong with that, and it can be quite fun to play such a party. However, it is something that everyone needs to be aware of at the start of the campaign. If you are playing an unbalanced party in a standard campaign, you are going to have to deal with things that are significantly more challenging than they otherwise would be, and you might have to find alternate ways to get things done, or just admit it isn't worth the effort to try certain things.

There are a lot of different ways to fill these four roles in 5e. Here are examples of just the most obvious ways of doing it:

Melee Tank:
Fighter
Paladin
Barbarian
Ranger
Cleric (Life, Nature, Tempest, War)
Druid (Moon)

Healer:
Cleric
Bard
Druid
Paladin

Mage:
Wizard
Sorcerer
Bard (Lore)

Thief:
Rogue
Lockpick + Investigation + Stealth proficiencies

And then you can get creative and come up with all sorts of other ways to fill those roles. A couple of rangers, a monk, a tome warlock with the ritual caster invocation, with one of those characters having the relevant thief proficiencies is an unorthodox 4 character party that can hit all of those roles by spreading them out. Multiclassing also works.

So I question how many groups will actually be unable to produce any players who are excited to play any options that provide a sufficient amount of healing to a 5e party to fulfill that role.

In 5e default healing, it feels to me like the healer role is no more important than any of the other four--and perhaps even less important.

Personally, I'll likely be using lower healing options because I like the effects on the campaign, and even so, I feel like it wouldn't be much more of a disadvantage in a party to lack a full healer than to lack someone who fulfilled any of the other roles. A party can really benefit from an archer dishing out massive damage, but they can get by without one of those a lot easier than they can without someone with a high AC and hp standing in the front line. A light cleric or druid can lay down some boom, but without a mage's utility effects it just isn't going to be the same. The thief role is the easiest one to fill in 5e, so not having it filled is almost a conscious choice.

For those who really have problems with a healer role for some reason, the action surge option in the DMG is probably enough to totally eliminate the need for a healer role. At that point healer gets moved into the secondary roles category--those that help the party but aren't vital, such as holyperson, nature child, face, or friends in low/high places. I'm not personally a fan of moving healer into a secondary role, but it seems to me that the DMG provides enough options to keep the healer role as important or unimportant as a group would like it to be. Some houseruling may be required.

 

[Sailor Moon]

I think some people are exaggerating the whole "wasting your turns to heal" argument when it comes to clerics. I'm not sure about you but our clerics weren't continously having to bounce around the battlefield healing everyone. Secondly, clerics were designed to be a support/melee character so you knew what you were getting into before the game started. Also, will someone please explain to me what it means to be "doing something cool"? Did anyone's DM never give the PC's a free hireling if someone in the group didn't want to play a cleric, or make sure healing potions were readily available?

 

[pemerton]

I think a big part of the problem with trying to find the perfect healing rate is that hit points represent a bunch of things. Per the PHB, they are a "combination of physical and mental durability, the will to live, and luck." Has anyone ever tried splitting up HP in to 2 categories- physical / mental and given them different healing rates?


<snip>

Anyone tried something like this with HP in D&D?

The first version of it that I'm familiar with was in the early 80s in White Dwarf: "How to Lose Hit Points and Survive", by Roger Musson. A 3E version of that system is part of the d20srd.

 

[pemerton]

Changing what the length of time is for a "rest" just to tweak healing will have TONS of unintended side effects.
Let's go with that gritty thing for example where a short rest is 8 hours and a long rest is a week.

<snip>

If you want a really low magic and special ability campaign, that almost works, except there are plenty of amazing things some classes or races can do who's recharge times are not based on "rests" which get distinctly MORE powerful in that kind of setting.

Are there very many of these? In the Basic PDF a cleric's divine intervention is on a 7-day recharge if successful; in "gritty" mode you'd probably turn that into a 1-month recharge.

Magic items seem to have daily rather than rest-based recharging, which means they certainly get stronger in a "gritty" campaign, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Well, some classes are balanced almost purely via short rest (Fighters, Monks) and others almost purely by long rest (Sorcerers, Wizards, and to a lesser extent, Clerics)...you don't feel making rests shorter overall would mean more power for the former?

No, provided that the GM manages the encounter density per unit of ingame time appropriately.

The only balancing factor is number of encounters per short rest N, and number of short rests per long rest M.

Whether a short rest is five minutes, an hour or a year doesn't change the balance.

In other words, this!

If your short rest becomes 5 minutes then your narrative has to change to monsters constantly hurling themselves at the party in order to keep your "number of encounters the same between".

Presumably the idea would be to use attacking NPCs/monsters in waves - close enough together to preclude short rests, but far enough apart to keep the enemy action economy under control. This is an approach to combat encounters which has some currency both in fantasy fiction, and in 4e play. So it makes sense that they suggest an option that allows for it.

Shorter overall rests make everyone more powerful, and longer ones make everyone weaker, that's definitely true.

Only if we measure "power" in terms of "ability to do interesting stuff per unit of ingame time". But that seems like a poor measure of power for a game played by real people in the real world. From the point of view of gameplay, nothing can be inferred about the significance of an ingame time period required to recover resources unless we know what the rate of resource-expenditure per unit of ingame time is. And that rate is not fixed - it is largely controlled by the GM, either directly (in a game in which the GM determines when encounters occur) or indirectly (in a sandbox game, it is still the GM who determines the geographic separation of interesting features, the frequency and likelihood of random encounters, etc).

QUOTE=Jeff Carlsen;6452234]Though that's assuming that the party will expend resources between every rest. The longer rest rules are fitting for campaigns where encounters don't happen multiple times a day, every day.[/quote]Right - I think this is the more useful perspective for thinking about the significance of ingame units of time used to recover game resources.

Changing the length of time for a "rest" works well, from a balance perspective, as long as you also scale the number of encounters per day. Spells recovering once a week is not a problem if you are facing 6-8 encounters per week instead of per day.

I just hope the DMG has the good sense to mention the 6-8 encounters are between long rests (as the game defines it), not "per day" (as in, 24 hours).

I don´t believe there is anyone too dumb to change that, if they change the rest length defaults.

I agree that, for those who care for such things, this is pretty obvious.

At least some of those looking for a "gritty" experience won't care about class balance, though, and so won't worry (and given their goals will be right not to worry), and will find their own happy approach via trial and error.

"Grim & Gritty" makes me think of OD&D/1E sandbox play. Players who realized their limitations and avoided unnecessary conflict lived. Those who relied on the DM to modify the world to suit their brazen style of play died. The DM doesn't have to worry about "encounters per timespan" if his campaign is not encounter-based. The players are the ones that need to use caution not to overextend themselves.

All that Grimm & Gritty (and other slower Healing Rules) does, is to focus more on magical instead of natural healing. So Clerics, Bards, etc. are even more important .. is that really that a good thing?

This is the sort of approach I had in mind in saying that some of those looking for a "gritty" experience won't care about class balance. They'll find their own approach, including their own approach to the importance of healing classes.

I don't care HOW good/skilled/lucky your players are, the game assumes that 6-8 encounters FACED before rest. A DM who assumes that 6-8 encounters per DAY and that recovery takes a WEEK is forcing 48-56 possible encounters, which is suicide. Tack on any but the most ginger of time-limits (as in; you have several months to clear out this dungeon, and no reinforcements are coming) your creating a meat-grinder of PCs and then blaming them for their incompetence.

Not saying YOU are doing this, just there can be a very easy way to misread this notion and create unplayable games in the name of "feel", I played in a few 2e games where healing was rare and magic was nonexistent but the DM felt no compulsion to modify how encounters worked. His game lasted two sessions.

Your example is an extreme instance of trial-and-error! In what I would imagine is the more typical case, other workarounds will be found - paying NPCs for healing, healing potions, magical pools in the dungeon, etc.

If I'm not extending the party's day, I'm not actually being an effective healbot, as I was saying superfluous.

To me this doesn't make sense.

It's like saying that my fighter is superfluous, because if I wasn't playing a fighter I'd be playing a magic-user instead, and killing the NPCs that way.

You're misreading the counterfactual. It's not "Would the PCs be less successful if I was playing a different character?", to which the answer, in an even remotely balanced game, must be "not really". It's "Would the PCs be less successful if my PC was not there?" And that's as true for a healer as for a fighter or MU.

I don't think a healer should be required, but I think it should be beneficial. A party should be able to accomplish more with a healer, the same as any other class. Having a wizard, warrior, or rogue isn't necessary but should be beneficial and help the party accomplish more.

Of course a party with a healer can accomplish more than if it lacked the healer. The issue is, should it be able to accomplish more than if it substituted a skirmisher, or a wizard, for the healer? I'm happy if the game gives a marginal reward for the synergy of diverse PCs - D&D is a party-oriented game, after all. But I don't think those benefits should eclipse other options. Choosing to play the second warrior, or the second archer, rather than a healer, should marginally increase the skill needed for the party to act at full efficiency. It shouldn't be crippling.

decouple rests from definitions given in minutes and hours!

Instead, say that the game engine expects 2-6 encounters per short rest, and 1-3 short rests between each long rest. (Just an example)

This is the 13th Age approach, but I suspect it is not very appealing to a significant chunk of the 5e audience.

 

[pemerton]

In my mind it all comes down to the difference between an RPG and a board game. An RPG system provides a framework, from which a group of people build a collective experience -- there is no winning or losing, whether or not goals or ambitions are accomplished. The more you make it about a set of rules that delineate what can and cannot be done, the more you lose immersion and the less of an "experience" it becomes.

<snip>

In board games, you find every little way to gain advantage by working within the rules, because that's part of the game. You're actively thinking about working the rules to your advantage. Doing so in D&D is very much opposed to the point of the game.

<snip>

in D&D the DM has (and has always had) complete control. With a good DM this provides the same certainty that rules provide to board games, and it also provides a kind of tension and uncertainty that heightens the experience of roleplaying, which board games can never hope to achieve.

So much of the complaining about the design philosophy of 5e is from people who either didn't get exactly the game they were hoping for from 5e or would be happier playing board games or video games anyway.

This post makes your preferred play experience very clear. But I think you need to acknowledge that others play RPGs, including D&D, for different reasons. For instance, I don't see how your description of what D&D play involves really encompasses classic modules like ToH, WPM, the G series, etc, where the goal of play isn't to immerse and "have an experience" but rather to beat the dungeon by clever use of the abilities that the game rules confer upon your PC (including, sometimes, outwitting the GM).

If 5e is meant to be a "unification" edition, it needs to support more than just your preferred approach.

Players don't make decisions in a vacuum, though. If my wanting to play a healbot will influence how everyone heals naturally, then maybe I'll choose to not play that character since it will just drag everyone down.

(Similarly, if nobody wants to play a trap-finder person, should the DM not include traps? Because if that's the case, then choosing to play someone who is good at traps actually increases the likelihood of bad stuff happening from traps.)

This is a matter of group's preferred playstyle (and adventure design style).

One approach, which I call "player focused", is that everyone plays who they think is fun and the GM prepares challenges for these specific characters. In one finds playing a trapfinding rogue fun then surely there will be traps to find, because that's what the player wants. If one plays a healing cleric, there will be many opportunities to heal and preach.

The other approach, "setting focused", is that challenges are independent of characters. Players should cover all important roles and work out party combos for their own advantage and if they don't, it's their own problem. If everybody's refusing to play a healer, it's like playing soccer without a goalkeeper. You can do it, but you will probably lose and you'll only have yourself to blame.

Steenan covers this. If your goal is to turn up and beat the GM's dungeon, then presumably the healing rules, that help set the parameters for "beating", have already been established. (Although perhaps there could be a "handicap" system - the group that takes on the G-series with nothing but thieves get bonus healing potions to start with, or something.) But if the group is playing a "player-focused" game, then tweaking the healing system (the density of traps, etc) is part of making sure that each player gets the experience out of the game s/he was looking for.

I always tailor my games to the player... if you make a master trap finder, there will be more traps, if you play a cleric I promiss not only a major undead event at some point but in general more religious themes

I mostly tailor, but not completely. My players know that I have a preference for undead and demons as antagonists, and so they tend to try and have a minimum deployable amount of "holy"/"radiant"-type attacks.

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Did anyone's DM never give the PC's a free hireling if someone in the group didn't want to play a cleric, or make sure healing potions were readily available?

As a GM I don't particularly care for either of these options. NPCs are a pain to run, and inevitably steal some of the show from the PCs. And plentiful healing potions spoil my sense of verisimilitude in the same fashion that inspirational hit point recovery spoils that of others.

One could have always ignored the overnight healing in 4e if one were so inclined. The only thing that stops someone from doing ignoring overnight healing in 4e is the same thing that stops someone from ignoring overnight healing in 5e: nothing.

And plenty of 4e players, including many who post on these forums, had solved this problem eg by going for longer extended rests, or rationing extend rests via skill challenges, etc.

 

[Bohemond D'Arlac]

My 5e gaming group has adopted the "no hit dice may be spent during short rests unless healing kits are used" and the "hit dice may be spent to heal after long rests" variants, with standard short rest and long rest durations. In the end I think that it is a fair compromise between gritty and casual.

 

[mouselim]

I totally agree with Robgrub and Sailor Moon - each character has a definitive or primary role to play. The fighter is a...well...fighter - he rolls up his sleeves and get into the fight - is this boring and stereotyping a class?

The rogue is a stealth and utility class - he sneaks about, hangs in the back shooting or backstabbing and is the first person called up to open doors or locks. When there is a trap, all eyes rolled towards the rogue - is this boring and stereotyping a class?

The wizard is a man of arcane ability. He also hangs back from close fighting and either shoots off spells or when the spells ran out, he relies on slings, light crossbow and now (which I personally hate), at-will cantrips. is this boring and stereotyping a class? All eyes will look at him when there is a puzzle or an arcane trap - is this boring and stereotyping a class?

So, why this thinking that a cleric doesn't welcome the healing role? He is a priest for goodness sake. He seeks to further the ends of his deity. To win more converts and glorify the powers and good-will of his patron.

All adventures will have combats, traps, puzzles and difficult situations. All classes have its (primary) roles to fulfil.

(PS: I shudder to think one day that our doctors said, "I don't want to heal...that's stereotyping and boring"...or in the midst of combat, when our soldiers are injured, our medics fold up their hands and shake their heads saying, "I don't want to heal...")

As for re-defining the short/long rest timeline to set a more gritty game, which is what the DMG did, is poorly done. It is so clear to any readers that what WoTC is trying to do - pander to the feel and need of gamers in all D&D versions (including 4e). That's just like trying to be Jack-of-All-Trades but Master-of-None. A pity really. Although I'll still proceed to play 5e but it does mar the experience when I have to house-rule this and several other aspects of the game rules (e.g. at-will cantrips).