D&D (2024) The Problem with Healing Powercreep

[Greg Benage]

Who here misses the 5 minute adventuring day???

I long for the time when rests were measured by how many days it would take the cleric to cast and recover all the healing spells necessary to get the party back in adventuring shape again.

 

[Vaalingrade]

I long for the time when rests were measured by how many days it would take the cleric to cast and recover all the healing spells necessary to get the party back in adventuring shape again.

I buried those days, nailed the coffin shut and rigged up a bell to alert the locals to break out the fire should they ever rise again.

Wasting both in-game time and table time counting those beans was insufferable.

Ah yes, the thrilling heroics of long bedrest and marking off spell slots that do nothing interesting but keep the numbers from going to 0 and making things SUPER uninteresting.

 

[Greg Benage]

I buried those days, nailed the coffin shut and rigged up a bell to alert the locals to break out the fire should they ever rise again.

Me too, but I suspect @Lanefan's "like" was unironic.

 

[DarkCrisis]

I buried those days, nailed the coffin shut and rigged up a bell to alert the locals to break out the fire should they ever rise again.

Wasting both in-game time and table time counting those beans was insufferable.

Ah yes, the thrilling heroics of long bedrest and marking off spell slots that do nothing interesting but keep the numbers from going to 0 and making things SUPER uninteresting.

Yeah, it rough saying "You head back to town and rest for a week and getting fully healed, costing you 20 gold, then head back out."

The absolute strain.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Yeah, it rough saying "You head back to town and rest for a week and getting fully healed, costing you 20 gold, then head back out."

The absolute strain.

Man, it if every actually happened like that for us, you'd be right!

But no, what actually happened was we'd have to roll every heal spell and the cleric would have to do their daily Jack Vance book report homework and be the only one who got to do something that day, and we'd also have to deal with whatever happened in-universe because we lost a week due to poor game design.

Oh and god forbid someone had the Heal skill and now we had to do checks and figure out what sad trickle of healing you got for bed rest plus nurse.

At least until we discovered wands of cure mod and reduced a half hour of wasted game to just making one guy waste valuable minutes erasing and rewriting charges and rolling dice.

 

[tetrasodium]

Yeah, it rough saying "You head back to town and rest for a week and getting fully healed, costing you 20 gold, then head back out."

The absolute strain.

While that aligns extremely accurately with my experience in "the old days" of 2e &3.x... I suspect that the unstated reason why the math gets called to question with terms like with terms like "insufferable" and "uninteresting" is for a completely different and entirely unreasonable situation. Yes there were times where the GM and players might talk over a partial rest that gives enough gas in the tank to reach a point where everyone feels that the PCs capable enough or not under an executioners axe while feeling like a full rest would be too much for whatever reason, but those don't fit terms like "insufferable" and "uninteresting" either.

What does fit those kinds of terms were situations where someone said "let's rest" only to be told some variation of "wtf no man it's horribly unsafe because of x y & z details" but decided to ignore all of that and force the GM's hand by calling their bluff. Once the GM's collaborative bluff got called the obvious next step is to engage in the worst rules lawyering in persuit of getting every last drop of recovery in service of running as close to a 5mwd as possible. Of course those kinds of players tended to annoy everyone at the table and often found themselves not being invited back after doing it enough. The unreasonable ability to say " I don't care about x y or z let's take a rest" without consequence or risk of backsliding is at the core of things.

 

[Mallus]

Who here misses the 5 minute adventuring day???

I miss the ever-so-heroic multi-day medical camping from the old Baldur’s Gate I & II games. Nothing says adventure like clicking the ‘camp’ button again.

 

[tetrasodium]

I miss the ever-so-heroic multi-day medical camping from the old Baldur’s Gate I & II games. Nothing says adventure like clicking the ‘camp’ button again.

Did they get ported over to a ti86 or something? I don't recall my PC being all that high end at the time, was yours so long in the tooth that resting took considerable processing time to finish resting up?

 

[Lanefan]

Me too, but I suspect @Lanefan's "like" was unironic.

It was.

Forcing the party to have to choose between a) resting for long enough to give the enemy time to do stuff and b) pressing on at reduced strength to (ideally) prevent the enemy from doing stuff is important IMO, and that choice is lost when resting gives everything back to the PCs before the enemy has a chance to move.

 

[Greg Benage]

It was.

I know, and I agree with you that "press on or rest" is (or should be) an interesting decision point for players. I don't think it follows that "therefore resting should take days of game time and rather a lot of play time committed to busywork." The game logic alone applies narrowly to a specific kind of military scenario--one in which there are clear advantages to sustaining pressure on an enemy that wants to buy time.

The game logic doesn't apply particularly well to other kinds of military scenarios. What if the pressure of an invader has united the enemy, and relaxing that pressure will cause them to fall back to infighting? What if there is no common, united "enemy" at all? What if the enemy is so big and the problem on such a scale that the party can remain in Rivendell as long as it takes? All the clerical BS is just delaying the cool Council scene that's coming next. What if it's an exploratory expedition such as a hexcrawl, where pressing on into the unknown with insufficient resources is simply foolish? What if it's a pulp Sword & Sorcery adventure where the pacing between Act I, Act II and Act III should be fast and furious? What if the PCs would otherwise press on to the next level of the dungeon, but because they know they have days of recovery and clericry ahead of them, they choose to withdraw early and get it over with before delving deeper?

From my perspective, this is something very common in the OSR, or among dedicated old-school players in general: The idea that a particular game dynamic is cool, and therefore that the weird/wonky/idiosyncratic way it was handled in the classic rules is genius, actually. The best OSR stuff identifies the cool game dynamic but isn't afraid to explore different ways of handling it.

Anyway, so as not to be a complete thread derail, Shadowdark still feels old-school to me and still gives the DM a terrific, much more flexible toolbox with which to present that "press on or rest" decision point while still using 5e's "full heal on rest" rules. In 5e itself, IME and as I said upthread, attrition pressures scarce resources (daily uses and spell slots) long before it pressures hit points, so even if you value the attrition dynamic, buffed healing spells shouldn't be a big concern. It might enhance the game effects of attrition by blowing through spell slots more quickly!