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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahnehnois" data-source="post: 6301215" data-attributes="member: 17106">You may be right about that. I suspect 2e is by far the edition that requires this the most because the healing rate is still low and healing is not all that widely distributed. Admittedly, my experience is colored by good ol' Baldur's Gate, wherein the protagonist character gains bonus healing magic, conveniently (and a cleric is still really important).I did not so much see the issue of reticence to playing such characters, and you could at least try to hack it with a druid or paladin, but it did seem really important.Not only the widespread wand usage, but also earlier spell availability for the tertiary casters, and a much higher natural healing rate.I don't know if "balance" is the term I would use. Healing is simply no longer much of a consideration.This is easier to patch though, because you can just run away from a bad combat encounter, or deal energy damage through your handy magic sword.Also, clerics and druids occasionally get area damage and various other effects that overlap with the big arcane stuff, and particularly in 3e, various different magic classes were introduced. A warlock covers that stuff just fine. At that point, it's really only necessary that someone in the party has magic, which is still of debatable merit, but is a pretty easy qualification to meet. The niche being protected here is just "magic".I'm long on the record as saying that I'm not a fan of that at all; I always felt like SoD should be an integrated part of the game, not a function of exception-based design buried in a few spells. The 3e massive damage rule was an attempt to address this but is somewhat impotent; UA makes it a tad better but there's still an enormous amount of underutilized design space here.Another thing I think would be interesting to incorporate into the combat rules would be some kind of area damage option. Implementation would be even harder, but I definitely think it's doable.</blockquote>

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