D&D (2024) The Problem with Healing Powercreep

[FrogReaver]

i find some flaws in the analysis. 2nd wind is being counted 3 times (presumably short rests) making it account for 19.5/40 or nearly 50% of the 151% listed for 5e level 1, but damage likely isn’t coming in evenly distributed to each pc per short rest. Meaning there’s a good chance 2nd wind won’t be needed some short rests.

Hit dice despite only recovering half each long rest are assumed that you can always use 100% of them.

Then theres the fact that most of the healing has some fairly big restrictions - 1 hour of downtime for a short rest. Also most healing is not individualized meaning it cannot be applied where needed like a cure wounds spell can, and finally some of it like 2nd wind is lost if the fighter was never injured before the short rest.

I guess the main point is that 5e healing typically runs out for 1 character before the others, meaning the total daily amount of healing when it comes 5e doesn’t really matter and this isnt a comparable stat to other editions where healing could almost always be applied to any pc.

 

[FrogReaver]

I guess I should also add there’s also the rate of resting to full hp. If in earlier editions the party just rested until hp was maxed after so much hp and healing was depleted then 5e giving more hp and healing resources to continue to push on simply means you are taking less rests, meaning you are at full resources less often, etc.

Of course more frequent and longer rest periods make time pressure easier to narratively justify, which is to say it’s a complicated dynamic.

 

[Daztur]

i find some flaws in the analysis. 2nd wind is being counted 3 times (presumably short rests) making it account for 19.5/40 or nearly 50% of the 151% listed for 5e level 1, but damage likely isn’t coming in evenly distributed to each pc per short rest. Meaning there’s a good chance 2nd wind won’t be needed some short rests.

Yeah, there are a good number of spherical cows here, tried to do the best analysis I could but it's impossible to do a perfect apples to apples one so just focused on maximum theoretical healing over a single day.

I guess I should also add there’s also the rate of resting to full hp. If in earlier editions the party just rested until hp was maxed after so much hp and healing was depleted then 5e giving more hp and healing resources to continue to push on simply means you are taking less rests, meaning you are at full resources less often, etc.

Of course more frequent and longer rest periods make time pressure easier to narratively justify, which is to say it’s a complicated dynamic.

I didn't include that for two reasons:
1. It's impossible to put a hard number on how much people heal during a long rest unless I assume that everyone starts their long rest at 1 HP which would just be too much of a Spherical Cow even for this somewhat handwavey analysis.
2. Often in practice in old editions of D&D you'd just go "and you rest in the town til you're healed" since you didn't feel like calculating out how many days you'd have to rest in town to get all your HPs back.

 

[FrogReaver]

Yeah, there are a good number of spherical cows here, tried to do the best analysis I could but it's impossible to do a perfect apples to apples one so just focused on maximum theoretical healing over a single day.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s interesting info nonetheless, but I’m more warning about drawing firm conclusions from your analysis because there’s far to many apples and oranges when compared to other editions.

I didn't include that for two reasons:
1. It's impossible to put a hard number on how much people heal during a long rest unless I assume that everyone starts their long rest at 1 HP which would just be too much of a Spherical Cow even for this somewhat handwavey analysis.

Indeed, but it could easily lead to scenarios where 5e has less healing, which is again the point. Comparing healing between long rests is cool, but if you aren’t starting the long rests and ending them at the same times it’s a bit of a fatal flaw, at least to draw conclusions about which game has more healing without that factored in (which I agree we have no good estimate of).

2. Often in practice in old editions of D&D you'd just go "and you rest in the town til you're healed" since you didn't feel like calculating out how many days you'd have to rest in town to get all your HPs back.

sure.

 

[Daztur]

Indeed, but it could easily lead to scenarios where 5e has less healing, which is again the point. Comparing healing between long rests is cool, but if you aren’t starting the long rests and ending them at the same times it’s a bit of a fatal flaw, at least to draw conclusions about which game has more healing without that factored in (which I agree we have no good estimate of).

Certainly. Other people on this thread have brought up scenarios in which the 3.5e party mass produces CLW wants. A strict apples to apples comparison is impossible so I did the best I could even though it had to handwave a few things and include some spherical cows.

 

[tetrasodium]

.
2. Often in practice in old editions of D&D you'd just go "and you rest in the town til you're healed" since you didn't feel like calculating out how many days you'd have to rest in town to get all your HPs back.

That's really only half the story and the other half is colossal impact on 5e healing as well as 5e resource recovery.

When a party was safely able to rest in the old editions that statement is true, but 5e changed the "when safely able to" to "literally any time the players choose to". It did that by digging a hole in the already fairly low and reasonable floor for starting a rest and removing any obstacle shy of being trolled by the gm till players stop saying "so anyways we try again" or fiat.

That difference means that the players no longer have a discussion where gm agrees to things like "well you obviously can't take a rest here/now... But I see your point and will let you recover [this benevolent fraction that seems appropriate or reasonable]".

 

[FrogReaver]

Certainly. Other people on this thread have brought up scenarios in which the 3.5e party mass produces CLW wants. A strict apples to apples comparison is impossible so I did the best I could even though it had to handwave a few things and include some spherical cows.

That’s 100% not how your OP reads. You are making firm conclusions there. You don’t hedge around spherical cows or handwaving.

 

[Ashrym]

For people figuring out second wind healing, 2024 fighters start with 2 now and 3 or 4 later. They regain 1 on a short rest and all on a long rest. If we're talking tiers of play we should have 3+1 per short rest in tier 2 and 4+1 per short rest in tiers 3 and 4.

ie. It's not hard for a 12th level fighter to use second wind 6 times in a day with 2 short rests averaging 105hp worth of healing. Plus hit dice healing on each of those short rests. Without those short rests it would be 4 times for 70hp worth of healing.

 

[Greg Benage]

The most surprising thing about this thread is that anyone ever found hit point attrition to be a thing in 5e. In every campaign I've played in or run (not even including organized play, which, LOL), use-per-day abilities, including spell slots, are the resource that actually matters for the purposes of attrition. I'll have to see how it works in play, but I could certainly see the buff to healing spells actually contributing to the effective attrition rate by increasing the speed with which spell slots are exhausted. I hope not, but I could see it.

If they ever get around to 6E, I'd like to see them give up the ghost of attrition-based gameplay entirely. I'm already going to run B/X or a B/X-based NSR game if I want to run an exploration-focused survival game, because 5e just ain't built for it, and I don't think resource-attrition-based gameplay makes much sense for a heroic fantasy game such as 5e. Just give everybody "short rest" abilities that recharge between scenes and get on with it.*

*Note that this would also work better for most pulp/Sword & Sorcery/Appendix N flavored campaigns, since they tended to be heroic fantasy. Conan rarely camps out in the middle of an adventure, nursing his wounds from the last fight.

 

[Daztur]

The most surprising thing about this thread is that anyone ever found hit point attrition to be a thing in 5e. In every campaign I've played in or run (not even including organized play, which, LOL), use-per-day abilities, including spell slots, are the resource that actually matters for the purposes of attrition. I'll have to see how it works in play, but I could certainly see the buff to healing spells actually contributing to the effective attrition rate by increasing the speed with which spell slots are exhausted. I hope not, but I could see it.

The attrition isn't to HPs specifically as much as to ways to regain HPs, when they run out and players have no more ways of recovering HPs then they really feel like they're on the knife's edge and I like getting players to that point.

If they ever get around to 6E, I'd like to see them give up the ghost of attrition-based gameplay entirely. I'm already going to run B/X or a B/X-based NSR game if I want to run an exploration-focused survival game, because 5e just ain't built for it, and I don't think resource-attrition-based gameplay makes much sense for a heroic fantasy game such as 5e. Just give everybody "short rest" abilities that recharge between scenes and get on with it.*

Most likely. And that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, the problem is that right now 5.5e is caught in an awkward place where some of the bones of 5e that they didn't change seem to be built around a more traditional attrition-based model (for example how many spell slots casters get, vs. the lower number in the original 5e playtest) while a lot of people's playstyle is moving away from that, resulting in a mis-match in playstyle and rules. What I mean is:

1. In an attrition based model easy fights serve a purpose since they drain away player resources.

2. In a non-attrition based model easy fights don't serve much of a purpose since the players winning is a given and the fight can't attrit away meaningful resources, leaving it kind of pointless from a game perspective. A non-attrition based game can easily fix this by having fewer harder fights so that every fight matters.

The problem is if you have fewer harder fights a lot of the wheels of 5e start to fall off (for example rogues become pathetically weak is everyone else can nova every fight).