D&D 5E Refusing To Heal Party Members?

[GMforPowergamers]

When has the wizard ever been expected to spend all of his spells casting haste and dispel for the party?

strawman... a wizard is exactly as expected to use his spells to benfit the entire party as the cleric... no one would complain 'You cast shield instead of magic missle' just like no one complains 'you cast bless instead of cure'... but if you have a spell slot that can do either spell and a situation comes up where the second spell is needed they are perfectly in there right to expect you would cast a spell to help...

The wizard (or mage) has always been free to decide on how to spend his spells for the benefit of all.

exactly as free as clerics have been. Or in this case palidens... I doubt anyone said to you "Why did you smite that enemy" or "Why did you lay hands to remove that disease" my understanding was you had the ability to heal, and had not used the resource yet, and the resouces was needed to heal... that is not at all what you are now saying...

When has the fighter ever been expected to always drop everything and run over to try and fight off any monster that threatens any other PC.

well if another PC is in over there head and need help, and the fighter has a resource he has not used yet that can help... yes he should be using that resource....

But the cleric. Whew. He'd better be saving every one of those spells to heal you because that's his one and only job. And heaven forbid we add a little bit of role-playing that is barely a blip on the radar of inconvenient.

yea, no one suggested any of that... prep your spells as you see fit, but when you prep or have the ability to swap out for healing, and you choose not to, then you have chosen that YOUR rescourses are more important then the rest of the team... there is no I in team, if you can help your teammate out and refuse, or insist on additional compensation, then why can't they turn around and do the same?

Perhaps you're better off with an NPC to tag along and heal you.

well if the only person with healing is refuseing to use the healing they have, maybe it's just better to replace that team member... cause even if the replacement isn't a healer they didn't loose healing...

That's not the clerics job in my games.

Clerics aren't special snow flakes that get exceptions in my games (both as a PC and GM) if they insiste there resources are not for team use, they should expect that others will quickly decide there resources and skills are also not for team use...

 

[GameOgre]

I want to play in these groups I keep hearing about. The entire group works as a team! Yeaj kick arse!

My groups are just not like that. we normally have.

Player 1-Playing a fighter" Mofo's better keep up! Stay behind me though cause im the $%$%"
Player 2- Barbarian "What did you say to me? Sorry can't hear you from WAAAAAY BACK THERE!"
Player 3- Thief "I'm still shadowing the barbarian and sneak attacking anything near him" Goes back to taking pictures of himself on his cellphone.
Player 4 Cleric "Umm hey fighter? I still have two orcs on me? Hello! $%$% it...I attack one orc and I want to use a god point thingy to attack the other one as well.
Player 1 Fighter "Wait are we still in combat? $%$% guys! We are still fighting back here! I hurry over and attack the orc on the cleric.
Player 5 Wizard "Can I see whats going on from the rope trick?
Player 2 Barbarian" GUYS! INCOMING DRAGON! I REPEATE INC DRAGON!!!!! oh and the Thief is dead!
Player 3 Thief "...............I got no heals at all"
Player 5 Wizard"I pull the rope up"
Player 4 Cleric "ok the orcs are dead! Did you guys say the dragon is dead? What dragon?"

 

[Uchawi]

I miss the 4E role where you had a variety of leaders that could contribute to healing based on power source, or striker, tank, etc.

 

[GameDoc]

I miss the 4E role where you had a variety of leaders that could contribute to healing based on power source, or striker, tank, etc.

I was just about to say that that part of this stems from people not wanting to play the healer role, but I think it has more to do with not everyone wanting to play a priest. Despite the wide variety of clerics available (as well as druids) I think many players still (at times erroneously) pigeonhole these classes as being more restricted in their choices because it all has to filter through the tenets of their character's religion. It's the same way of thinking that leads so many people go think all Paladins have to be "lawful stupid", which was never the case even when they all had to be lawful good. The player sees it as sacrificing rokleplaying flexibility in a way that fighters, rogues, and wizards don't have to. Monks and warlocks I guess must have enough of a cool factor of some kind that spares them from being cast in the same vein.

At any rate, right or wrong this is a predictable pattern with players. I admired that 4e tried to remedy this with other types of classes that could be primary healers and I think that's why we see so much interest in a 5e warlord. We need more options to fill that role. The bard does a passable job in 5e, but then again bards come with their own venerability to being pigeonholed.

 

[Sunseeker]

I was just about to say that that part of this stems from people not wanting to play the healer role, but I think it has more to do with not everyone wanting to play a priest. Despite the wide variety of clerics available (as well as druids) I think many players still (at times erroneously) pigeonhole these classes as being more restricted in their choices because it all has to filter through the tenets of their character's religion. It's the same way of thinking that leads so many people go think all Paladins have to be "lawful stupid", which was never the case even when they all had to be lawful good. The player sees it as sacrificing rokleplaying flexibility in a way that fighters, rogues, and wizards don't have to. Monks and warlocks I guess must have enough of a cool factor of some kind that spares them from being cast in the same vein.

At any rate, right or wrong this is a predictable pattern with players. I admired that 4e tried to remedy this with other types of classes that could be primary healers and I think that's why we see so much interest in a 5e warlord. We need more options to fill that role. The bard does a passable job in 5e, but then again bards come with their own venerability to being pigeonholed.

A fair point though, while any cleric druid or paladin has healing, priests of light and goodness and kittens make better healers. Which is part of the problem and one of the reasons the Warlord was popular. You make a less effective healer if you take the war, trickery or death domains than you do if you take the light, life or gumdrops and rainbows domain.

People feel pigeon-holed because they are. Conceptually all of the options for "good" healers are presented as more priestly, pious and generally holy-do-gooder-in-white-robes than the rest. Add deity alignment restrictions on top of that and you end up with a rather stock "healer" mold that gets boring pretty fast.

If I could take the storms domain and heal people with lightning, I think we'd see more variety and feel less pigeon-holed, but since we can't, we don't, so we do.

As an aside to 4e, I felt that conceptually each class was more rounded, in part thanks to healing surges, but while the holy trinity was clearly written into it, it had a "4th spec" and felt less dependent on it than 3X or 5e does. I never worried about my parties needing a tank or healer in 4e, I do even on little things now.

 

[Tia Nadiezja]

A fair point though, while any cleric druid or paladin has healing, priests of light and goodness and kittens make better healers. Which is part of the problem and one of the reasons the Warlord was popular. You make a less effective healer if you take the war, trickery or death domains than you do if you take the light, life or gumdrops and rainbows domain.

People feel pigeon-holed because they are. Conceptually all of the options for "good" healers are presented as more priestly, pious and generally holy-do-gooder-in-white-robes than the rest. Add deity alignment restrictions on top of that and you end up with a rather stock "healer" mold that gets boring pretty fast.

If I could take the storms domain and heal people with lightning, I think we'd see more variety and feel less pigeon-holed, but since we can't, we don't, so we do.

Life clerics beat things to death with blunt objects while wearing the heaviest armor available. They are walking, talking ambulances armed with heavy cannons and a proclivity toward running over pedestrians on their way to the patient and equipped with tank armor. They are joyous violations of everything right, good, and Geneva Convention-y in the world.

When you stop and think about your Life cleric, they don't come off terribly sunshine-and-puppies.

And all of that holds true for Light clerics, with a strong side order of divine laser beams.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

I miss the 4E role where you had a variety of leaders that could contribute to healing based on power source, or striker, tank, etc.

as a group we do't have a lot of like for clerics, but we always feel we need a healer. So 4e was perfect we had a lot of warlords, a few ardents, a shaman, and only 1 or 2 clerics... but something amazing happened, we had people WANT to do a divine character and then looked at invoker, avenger, and cleric, and paliden and felt that they could make a full concept (they went invoker)

 

[GMforPowergamers]

I want to play in these groups I keep hearing about. The entire group works as a team! Yeaj kick arse!

I'm not saying we always ACHIVE the goal of party simitry and good working togather, far from it. However we do strive to, and I have limited (very limited) slack for people who cause problems on purpose... "Opps I forgot I had like six healing potions," is a mistake... "Oh man I didn't update my attack bonus and since last time I did my stat went up, my prof went up and I switch from a non + item to a +2 weapon... so all last fight I hit 4ACs higher" are all things that happened in my games...

But "I have this resource and I wont use it" or "If you want me to use this resouces I have you have to pay me" isn't a mistake...

 

[GameDoc]

In the homebrew I'm working on I'm trying to figure out a way that clerics delay their domain choice until third level, the way all the other classes delay their thematic choice. Fluff-wise most clerics serve "the gods" and not a specific deity. Third level, they can choose to remain on this path or be recruited into a single deities mystery cult and take on the domain associated with that deity. Mechanically, all I can come up with to approximate a vanilla cleric is to have them default to the life domain (sans heavy armor proficiency) for the first few levels before switching over. I think that speaks to shidaku's well-made point. The healer role pulls for the living saint archetype (assuming your not playing evil characters).

 

[GameDoc]

In my experience as a DM, 80% of players that play CN are playing it as 'Diet CE'. They want all the 'benefits' of being evil, without having to put it on their character sheet.

This, 100%. I saw the same with the "Unaligned" option in 4e.

My experience as well.

It's funny - I've been reading some of the older FR novels lately, which were written to approximate D&D as it was in 1e/2e. I've yet to see a depiction of a druid that doesn't come off as morally good, even though at the time druids were required to be true neutral in alignment.

The neutral alignments are often a conundrum for players, and perhaps for authors too it see,s.