D&D General Refresher Course D&D Edition Numbers. AKA Modern D&D Is a Self Inflicted Problem.

[Zardnaar]

Depends on what you mean by bloat. They don't, as a concept, contribute to the hp you have available within one encounter (except with Second Wind which for most people is an action to use). There's nothing that says you couldn't include healing surges in 3e except the work you'd need to rework all healing magic (and figure out what to do about different levels of healing spells). And they also make healing proportional in a very nice way – having an action spent on healing actually giving a decent result is nice.

Do they make it harder to wear PCs down through sandbagging them across multiple encounters? Yes. That's a feature, not a bug.

If you have the cure light wounds spell in the game and the Craft Wand feat, you will have wands of cure light wounds. And I think those probably make attrition even more difficult than healing surges do, because wands have no limit other than money, and the exchange rate of gp per hp is amazing.

Wands exist but there's no big sign saying use them. They developed via forums uptake wasn't universal.

I'm not 100% they existed in 3.0 dmg. Mines missing.

If youre advocating for healing surges the nay have solved some problems but contributed to others. Hard to build tension when each PC has buckets of hp available comparatively. Combine tgat with anemic 4E monsters its fairly hard to die and contributes to 4Es slow combat.

Minis and battle grid also contributes less explicit in 3.5 and even less in 3.0.

So yeah if you like that fair enough. But its a primary cause of 4E whimpering death as well.

5E designers took a bad idea from 4E and ramped up damage for "quick" combat when they (collectively) invented the grind in the first place. Derp.

5.5 is moving back into emphasizing minis. Back then it was to sell minis I'm sure its got nothing to do with Beyond or vtt plans they had.

 

[Staffan]

Wands exist but there's no big sign saying use them. They developed via forums uptake wasn't universal.

I'm not 100% they existed in 3.0 dmg. Mines missing.

Wands of cure light wounds are on the random treasure tables in the 3.0 DMG. Further, once you become able to put any non-personal spell into a wand, its use becomes obvious (much like the wand of mage armor which lets the wizard and possibly even monk enjoy the fruits of that spell without "wasting" spell slots, at a cost of 750 gp for +4 armor instead of the 16,000 gp bracers of armor +4 cost).

It becomes even more obvious once you realize that 3e wands are useless for offensive spells, because they assume the minimum ability score and lowest caster level possible, so if you get e.g. a wand of entangle you'll get an entangle that lasts for 1 minute (which is fine) and has a save DC of 11 (which is not). So instead you look for spells that don't have saves and where caster level matters little to not at all, and put those in wands.

If youre advocating for healing surges the nay have solved some problems but contributed to others. Hard to build tension when each PC has buckets of hp available comparatively. Combine tgat with anemic 4E monsters its fairly hard to die and contributes to 4Es slow combat.

Minis and battle grid also contributes less explicit in 3.5 and even less in 3.0.

So yeah if you like that fair enough. But its a primary cause of 4E whimpering death as well.

There's a difference between the hit points available within one encounter and the hit points available over the course of an adventuring day. Healing surges let you threaten one while still having the other left. Now, 4e got the numbers wrong overall: too many monster hp, and the defenses being off compared to accuracy, but the concept of healing surges itself was amazing. They also removed the need for a cleric in the party – having a leader/support/healer type is useful, but (a) it doesn't have to be a cleric and (b) it's a nice-to-have, not a necessity.

There was a related mechanic in 3e Unearthed Arcana called Reserve points, which was basically a second pool of hp you could fill up your actual hp from in between fights, letting you heal up without using magic. Unlike healing surges though, healing magic doesn't draw from this pool.