D&D 5E Second Wind: Yes or No?

[LostSoul]

Hiya.

In general, I don't like the idea of a "healing surge'. To me it goes directly against one of the core driving forces behind D&D; limited resources encouraging thoughtfulness, preparation, and teamwork.

Odd, that. Healing surges do exactly that, considering how you can spend them in an encounter. It's the ease of having an Extended Rest (where you get them all back) that takes those choices away. And you can get there (edit: to full HP healing after each fight) any number of ways; healing surges aren't the only one: wands of cure light wounds will do it, as will any lack of time pressure.

Want to talk about my game but that's probably a distraction.

 

[Manbearcat]

Odd, that. Healing surges do exactly that, considering how you can spend them in an encounter. It's the ease of having an Extended Rest (where you get them all back) that takes those choices away. And you can get there (edit: to full HP healing after each fight) any number of ways; healing surges aren't the only one: wands of cure light wounds will do it, as will any lack of time pressure.

Want to talk about my game but that's probably a distraction.

No, actually please do, if you would. I suspect most would like to hear your elaboration.

I agree with you on the point above. Healing Surges are exactly that; "limited resources encouraging thoughtfulness, preparation, and teamwork." We had this conversation in another thread; about Healing Surges being a pressure point in different games/playstyles. In my group, they are a great source of pressure;

- Only 3 PCs with no pure Defender or Leader.
- Standard combat is Level + 2.
- Exploration Skill Challenge intensive with healing surges lost for each failed check and sometimes for successful. Oftentimes I'll use Condition Track mechanics to supplement this pressure. A failed Exploration Challenge may result in getting lost or stumbling onto something dangerous (if the stakes involved were to locate something in a dangerous, unkempt wilderness).
- 2 of the 3 PCs have Martial Practices and use them regularly.

All told, in a day where we have 2 combats and an Exploration Skill Challenge, it is extremely likely that the PCs will be up against their daily allotment of Healing Surges. If they fail that Skill Challenge and get lost? Things can get pretty tense.

 

[LostSoul]

No, actually please do, if you would. I suspect most would like to hear your elaboration.

Not too much to say; I set the recovery of HS to 1 per day, provided that you take no other actions.

Which is kind of lame on its own.

I "added" a whole other set of actions that PCs can take - from gaining GP, XP, building structures, raising their reputation in town (thus lowering the complexity of social skill challenges), levelling up, making magic items or tech, etc. - and made a big (the main) portion of the cost of such actions time.

Then I made explicit rules about how many NPC factions exist on the sandbox map, their goals, how many resources they have to expend, and how often they can "level up" (and how - so players can make choices about that); as well as how towns react to the PCs who have been hanging around based on what they've been up to.

I've tied some PC-class actions to specific behaviours - clerics perform liturgies, which people like; wizards study, which freaks people out - to how the town reacts to the PCs.

I have yet to stress-test it. I planned on doing that but we got caught up in the PCs and what they were up to. That was helpful, though, I adjusted how XP is gained.

[sblock]We're playing out a situation where - well, it's complicated. The warlock Tiefling PC had, as her goal, to figure out what happened to the nearby ruined, radiation-infested Bael Turothian city. She had a feeling that the nearby forest, which she knew was under some kind of magical spell, might have some idea.

(The forest was a strict source of adversity, based on the hexmap-creation rules: "The forest has an ill will. It resents the easy languages of man and their ability to share secrets." In play we determined that the wizard who built the town - a thousand years ago, his concrete structures still stand above his dungeon - must have done something to grant the forest sentience. He created manticores through gene-splicing, after all!)

Anyway. The warlock rounded up three people from town - an old man, a child, and a grown man - and gave them to the spirits of the forest in exchange for knowledge. (They were some kind of vine horror.) They told her that they had an ancient memory of the nearby city being destroyed by a dragon and "hot air" - which the PC knew was radiation. (So we found out through play that green dragon breath dealt radiation damage. Which another PC is using her time resource to make an antidote against.)

During that night, the warlock wanted to free the dryad that one of the merchants in town was using as a supply of drugs for her tavern. The merchant didn't know how to process the reagents, but her faithful barber surgeon did; the PC killed him. The PC tried to use one of her warlock powers to teleport the dryad's tree away, but it failed (thanks to DM judgement).

So. The next day the people are freaked out about what happened, especially the merchant. She's gathering people in the middle of town as a posse to root out the truth - she wants revenge on whoever killed her source of easy drug money.

In comes the PC. She hates the merchant (she doesn't like many NPCs!), so she wants to frame her for the murders. Skill challenge goes out; it's reasonably close, though the PC has the ability to tell bald-faced lies, so she pretty easily succeeds. The kicker, though, is that the skill challenge is about how to figure out who was responsible. It ends up in the totally insane situation where a "trial by combat" is going to figure it out, but the victor is going to be the guilty party. (The people were pretty jazzed up when they heard about it, but after a few hours realized it was strange. Then again, most people just wanted to see blood.)

(That's one thing I like about social skill challenges. We never get results that anyone would have expected, but they always feel "right" - probably more right than those that would come up from a "DM decides" system. NPCs get convinced to do irrational things all the the time - which makes perfect sense to me, since people are irrational. Such was the case here, and most NPCs commented on how strange it was.)

The warlock then goes around to some of the important - powerful - NPCs in town. One's a cleric of Lolth, and she can get people to believe her lies (if she "kills" them with her radiant damage). Another was a cultist of Tharizdun who could drive madness into people. Together they worked out a situation where they could frame the merchant.

Oh yeah, the warlock communed with her patron - Baalzebul, Lord of Lies and Flies - and asked for an additional power. She got an at-will power, as potent as a magic item based on the challenge she faced, that would allow her to force people to see all the lies they've told and be driven insane by them (psychic damage). She had to do some creepy stuff to commune - the creepiness aided by the fact that I googled a picture of her victim (she had to force-feed her flies that got caught on a fly-strip tainted by a liar's blood). That was a skill challenge against Baalzebul himself, and the PC had to comply with his demands in order to rack up the successes.

The fights have been fun to go through. Pretty crazy, since the merchant is a minion, and the three ladies are trying to keep her alive through fell magics.[/sblock]

I agree with you on the point above. Healing Surges are exactly that; "limited resources encouraging thoughtfulness, preparation, and teamwork." We had this conversation in another thread; about Healing Surges being a pressure point in different games/playstyles.

One thing about 4E that I don't see too much discussion about is how to leverage healing surges towards interesting decisions - mmm, probably not surges themselves, but extended rests.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I don't understand "once the battle's over, I can inspire myself all I want". Spending healing surges in a short rest isn't about inspiration. (Though it can involve that, if a bard uses the relevant class ability to boost hp regained per surge.)

But yes, I do find the idea that one PC would bandage another's wound while in the midst of melee laughable. I have never encountered that in any piece of fantasy fiction, whereas inspired recovery is a well-established trope.

Which is all well and good and fine. I wouldn't want D&D NEXT's basic game to assume the use of 4e skald healing, either.

In the basic game, I'm totally comfortable with the only HP-restorative effect being that of the cleric's divine magic, which actually and literally "cures wounds," the only limit on how much you can heal being how many times the cleric is capable of casting that spell.

And in an optional rule, I'm totally comfortable with some people opting into a surge system that limits what a cleric can do based on the individual because it works better for them. Not for me, but this game is a big umbrella.

As an optional rule, I'm totally fine with a Second Wind being introduced for some self-healing during battle. That's up my ally, because I like the image of a combatant pausing for a moment to recover their faculties (I'd probably personally use it as a daily thing, so that there's still attrition over the adventuring day, rather than giving someone an infinite number of them, because I don't want to use surges).

I don't see one as inherently superior to the other, just better at different tables for different players with different purposes (since all design is local). Since neither is "better" or "worse," I think the basic game should probably run with what is historical and thus expected for its particular audience as a baseline, adding in variants to show other ways it has been/could be done.

 

[Cleon]

I'll give it a go. Although, some of your conditions are rather subjective. I've never playtested this, so the numbers are just speculative. In particular, I'm not sure the penalties are worth their overhead outside a gritty campaign.

1. HP represent the ability to avoid significant injury and continue fighting at full capacity. This is a combination of endurance, experience, determination and luck. Combat generally proceeds as we'd expect.
2. Characters recover all their HP (except as noted below) at the end of a campaign-specific rest period. In different campaigns, this might be at the end of each combat, a 5 minute breather, an overnight rest, or a return to town for a day of R&R.
3. If an attack reduces a character HP to zero or less, or a character with 0 hp is hit, they must make an injury roll of d20 + the excess damage. The result of the roll determines the type of injury they sustain:
   1. <11: Light Wound, -2 penalty, recover up to 75% max hp during recovery
   2. 11-15: Serious Wound, -4 penalty, recover up to 50% of max hp during recovery
   3. 16-20: Critical Wound, -6 penalty, recover up to 25% of max hp during recovery, 50% chance of unconsciousness
   4. 21+: Mortal Wound, character is unconscious and dying. (goto whatever dying rules you prefer)
   • Penalties apply to all checks, saves, attacks, AC, and movement (squares), and are not cumulative. (They do not apply to other injury rolls.)
   • Some creatures, spells, and abilities may specify effects (such as poison, paralysis, etc.) that supersede this chart.
4. Wounds can only be healed through R&R, or various magical effects. A lightly wounded character will recover with 1d6 days of R&R, a seriously wounded character 3d6, and a critically wounded character with 5d6 days of R&R.
   • If under the care of a skilled healer reduce the size of the dice to d4s.
   • Optionally in grittier campaigns, a critically wounded character heals to become seriously wounded and a seriously wounded character heals to be lightly wounded.

Anyway, that's my first draft. I've been thinking about trying something like this in the Old-school game I play in.

I played around with a similar idea once, but never tried it out in-game. It's long bothered me that there's a cure moderate wound spell in D&D but no such thing as a "moderate wound", and this approach is a nice way to align different grades of injury to different levels of healing spell (e.g. light injury = cure light wound, mortal wound = heal, dead = raise dead).

It does beg the question how blood-draining attacks like a stirge are supposed to work if opponents are only wounded when they run out of HP, but blood-drain has had verisimilitude issues in previous versions of D&D without that bringing the whole system down (the old does HP = blood volume problem).

Now I wouldn't recommend it for the core rules, but I'd be happy to have some sort of "negative HP results in wounds" mechanism as a standard option.

The main thing is to keep it relatively simple, at least to start with. A "hit point & wound level" approach opens up quite a wide design space for optional rules, such as.

• An exceptional high damage hit (maybe only a "critical hit" roll) could cause a wound as well as HP damage.
• A wounded character can "fight carefully" (taking the normal wound penalties) or "ignore his wounds" (takes N hit points of damage but ignores the wound penalties).
• A wound could be tied to a simple hit location system - e.g. a light leg wound penalizes movement, a light head wound penalizes sense rolls.
• Instead of avoiding a hit, hit points allows characters to absorb hits - they're "life-energy" that power a "personal force field". This option allows PCs to jump/fall off cliffs then dust themselves off and walk away from the crater while still having a role for wounds.

No doubt other folk can come up with a lot of other notions.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Look man, its okay if you still like surges better. They are a fine mechanic AFAICT, I don't have a problem with them. Nonetheless, I'm confident that they are not the only way to skin that cat.

It's not a question of liking or disliking surges. I can take or leave them. Though I think some of the confusion is that I'm talking about mechanical solutions that do certain things. (It's entirely possible that someone could come up with a mechanical solution that would technically work, but be so divorced from the game that no one would consider it for two seconds, but that's not exactly useful.)

Having been down this road many times, though, I don't think there is a better way to skin the cat--mechanically. You might be able to rename/flavor it and/or tweak it to make it more acceptable, but it still boils down to the problem that if you want to have diminishing returns on a simple hit point system, you are going to end up with something that can be most simply mathematically represented as something akin to what surges do now--a number associated with a character that constrains how much healing they can get in a given day.

Your system doesn't do that--it the magical healing is available, the character can be healed indefinitely. And you are correct, that's how almost every system does it that uses simple hit points--putting the onus back on the DM to limit the sources of healing, and thus control the pacing thereof.

 

[Ratskinner]

It's not a question of liking or disliking surges. I can take or leave them. Though I think some of the confusion is that I'm talking about mechanical solutions that do certain things. (It's entirely possible that someone could come up with a mechanical solution that would technically work, but be so divorced from the game that no one would consider it for two seconds, but that's not exactly useful.)

Having been down this road many times, though, I don't think there is a better way to skin the cat--mechanically. You might be able to rename/flavor it and/or tweak it to make it more acceptable, but it still boils down to the problem that if you want to have diminishing returns on a simple hit point system, you are going to end up with something that can be most simply mathematically represented as something akin to what surges do now--a number associated with a character that constrains how much healing they can get in a given day.

I feel like either: you didn't really grasp all the implications of what I proposed, or you weren't clear with your criteria, or you're just moving goalposts.

A. There is a finite limit on how much a character can take in a relatively small amount of time, despite external sources of healing being available (such as cure light wounds or potions of healing).

B. The system is elegant, reasonably simple to use and track, and at least nods towards game play and simulation of a typical D&D universe. For example, it's ok for it to support gritty play, but not if the grit excludes more epic play. It's ok for it to model the physics of healing somewhat, but not at the full exclusion of all game decisions.

C. The mechanics do not show much correspondence to the surge mechanics.

Careful reading reveals that "diminished returns on healing" is not a requirement of your criteria (maybe you dropped an "hp" or "damage" from your the first sentence?). Thus your reasoning to get to "a number associated with a character that constrains how much healing they can get in a given day" is not relevant. If those are your actual criteria, then I agree, "something like healing surges" will emerge, although how much alike is naturally a subjective judgement. Didn't one of the playtest packages have some kind of HD mechanic like that?..or maybe I'm remembering discussion about the HD being usable like that. l...if I were still playtesting, I might look it up.

Anyhow, play what you like and all.

 

[Jeff Carlsen]

On the original subject of Second Wind, I would prefer it to be one possible use for a universal metagame mechanic like bennies or action points.

 

[Manbearcat]

Not too much to say; I set the recovery of HS to 1 per day, provided that you take no other actions.

I "added" a whole other set of actions that PCs can take - from gaining GP, XP, building structures, raising their reputation in town (thus lowering the complexity of social skill challenges), levelling up, making magic items or tech, etc. - and made a big (the main) portion of the cost of such actions time.

<snip>

One thing about 4E that I don't see too much discussion about is how to leverage healing surges towards interesting decisions - mmm, probably not surges themselves, but extended rests.

So you have composed an elaborate extended rest system composed of several mini-games whereby PCs can "flesh out" their interests and challenge themselves during downtime. That, however, is at tension with true rest; the recovery of their Healing Surges which gets them back in the (adventuring) game. Is that about right? If so, that is quite an endeavor and sounds like a great idea. It wouldn't work for certain tables but it would definitely be something that would appeal greatly to others.

As to the second part, if you're talking about healing surges, I do agree in part. I think a functional "healing surge economy" (the kind of which @Nemesis Destiny seems to have accomplished with his house rules - see thread) is something that 4e is missing. Its a great commodity that could be made a great source of adventure tension and compelling investment mini-gaming if it was made fungible and the tradeoffs were worthy. In my game, this is accomplished merely through the fact that (A) the PCs will be facing difficult encounters all the time and thus losing surges, (B) the PCs will be using Martial Practices regularly, and (C) my game is rife with HS costing Exploration challenges and Conditions. Using a system like Nemesis Destiny composed would supplement that considerably.

As far as Extended Rests goes, you're correct, the game is certainly missing discussion along the lines of what you have composed for your home game. If something like that were a module for 5e, my guess is that it would find good traction. I am curious though, the rate of Healing Surge recovery in your game is extremely low. The implications are, of course, that you likely do not run deadly, surge-heavy, combats regularly. If you would (and just ballpark, no need for precision), how many characters (and their roles) are in your game, what is the average number of combats your have per adventuring day, and what is the average loss of HS/character per day?

 

[Crazy Jerome]

I feel like either: you didn't really grasp all the implications of what I proposed, or you weren't clear with your criteria, or you're just moving goalposts.

Well, since I read your posts several times, carefully, and since I know I'm not moving any goal posts, it was probably the middle one.

I tried to clarify it, but I'm mainly being provocative. I think there are a lot of healing ideas proposed where people don't think through the implications of what it takes to run with the main idea, simplify it for game play while preserving the main idea, but still be acceptable to a wide range of players.

So we are constantly getting proposals that don't really address the concerns of wide swaths of players--or get caught up in the terminology instead of the mechanics. I'm mainly interested in diminishing return healing mechanics that work, because my own explorations in various system have convinced me that it's the only way to bridge the simulation and gamism concerns simply. My criteria are probably stricter than most people would adopt for that reason, but they are my criteria after all. Nor do I pretend that they are the only way to do a good healing system. I just think that good healing systems that use other criteria will have a different set of flaws and benefits that people will react to (for good and ill).