D&D (2024) The Problem with Healing Powercreep

[Clint_L]

The Five Minute Adventuring Day is a common trap for DMs to fall into and it can REALLY suck the fun out of a game. The some ways I've seen of dealing with it include:

1. Traditional dungeon crawls. If the treasure is deep in the dungeon and you can't take long rests in the dungeon the DM can sit back and let the players deal with the conundrum of knowing that delving deeper gives them more treasure but also more encounters and that if they retreat from the dungeon after each fight they'll never get squat for treasure. This works especially well with GP = XP advancement rules. The main problem with this in 5e is you often end a session in the dungeon which is a real pain in the ass if real world issues mean a slightly different roster of players each session.

2. "You're on a boat and can only take a long rest at a friendly port" plenty easy to screw with the boat and make it hard to get to a friendly port. I've had a lot of success with boat-based 5e games.

3. If you can't beat them join them. 4e works fine if there's just 1-2 big fights per long rest. 5e emphatically does not. I think this is probably the single biggest problem with 5e design in terms of the rules not matching the way the median player plays it (as opposed to 5e not matching my personal tastes).

I wouldn't entirely agree that 5e "emphatically does not" work with an adventuring day built around fewer encounters. It works fine; you just have to adjust the nature of the encounters. Actual play shows seem to have little problem with it either. But your 1 and 2 strategies are viable, too; if you're doing that you have to down tune the finale.

 

[Leatherhead]

I disagree with the entire premise of this thread.

I don't want healing to be useful in the middle of combat. If healing becomes useful in combat, it becomes mandatory in combat, and I just don't like having to force anyone into the healer slot of a party.

Also the metric used is entirely wrong for making healing useful in combat to begin with. You need to measure the Action economy of how much you can heal with one action VS how much damage a monster can deal with an action. And you want it to be at a greater than 3 to 1 ratio to make up for the fact you had to turn your action into a heal, had to pay for the heal, and need to make headway against attrition to make it worth your while.

Which has nothing to do with total hp percentages per day.

 

[cbwjm]

The increase in healing for healing spells in 5.5 is needed, the 5e ones were a little too weak to be really useful. I would have preferred something more like 4e healing but that ship has long ago sailed

 

[Daztur]

Love the OP. It's thoughtful, detailed, and puts forward a strong case. I don't know that the solution is that much like healing surges in 4e, but the core concept of capping overall healing by tying it to hit dice is very clever.

Thanks! For Healing Surges vs. tying healing to Hit Dice they're basically the same thing in terms of what they do to a game. The main difference is that 4e healing surges were REALLY generous.

I also agree with the point that healing in 5e is usually a sucker's bet. If you math it out, in most cases the healer could have saved the party more HP by doing something else, such as killing or incapacitating an opponent. In 5e, healing usually only matters if it's a stonking big heal, like mass heal, or a little bonus action when someone is unconscious, like healing word.

Yup and I don't really mind tactical healing getting buffed since healing in 5e was such a bad newbie trap. I'm just worried about the strategic implications of buffing tactical healing. I don't mind PCs pumping out a lot of healing in a ROUND I'm more worried about them pumping out a lot of healing in a DAY. You can have powerful smashy healing spells that are well worth casting in combat without a deep deep well of strategic healing that allows PCs to get healing from KOed to full over and over and over during on adventuring day.

I'm interested to see how 2024 changes that equation. In general, heals are a bit better and characters are a little tougher. What we found out during play testing is that mobs feel much, much weaker, and that will probably be true for most groups, at least until the new MM comes out.

Yeah, I'm interested in seeing where the 5.5e meta lands as I don't think we've seen it yet as (like you say) a lot of 5.5e PCs can plow through 5e monsters so what sort of gameplay starts to predominate when 5.5e PCs start to regularly fight (presumably strongly) 5.5e monsters hasn't really been hashed out yet. I think the new meta will involve more healing and I'm starting to worry that we'll go back to the "who's going to roll up a healer this campaign" issue that was such a pain in some older editions, that wasn't such a thing in 5e.

I also think the game is just moving away from attritional play, in general. As the style has shifted to more of a story focus there tends to be an emphasis on having fewer fights with higher stakes rather than a bunch of low stakes encounters leading up to the climax. This is what we see in actual play shows, for example, but it's also how my own games play out. In fact, the first thing I do when adapting an adventure for my table, as I am currently doing with Vecna: Eve of Ruin, is cut a bunch of the minor battles and beef up the big ones. So that has a lot of implications for how healing works over an adventuring day.

As much as I prefer attritional play myself I can clearly see that most players are moving away from that and WotC should cater to them not to me. There are some issues (like with me hating the 5.5e version of Command where I'm willing to scream into the wind that I'm right if 99% of people disagree with me) but this isn't one of them.

But there's a problem. A BIG PROBLEM. Basically I completely disagree with what you say here:

I wouldn't entirely agree that 5e "emphatically does not" work with an adventuring day built around fewer encounters. It works fine; you just have to adjust the nature of the encounters. Actual play shows seem to have little problem with it either. But your 1 and 2 strategies are viable, too; if you're doing that you have to down tune the finale.

In my experience 5e doesn't work well with adventuring days build around fewer encounters. The main problems I've seen crop up again and Again and AGAIN:
1. It completely destroys any semblance of balance. For example rogues are already below par in 5e and arguably the weakest class in 5.5e (due to the monk buff) and if you have only a few encounters then rogues become faaaaaaaaaaar weaker than the rest of the party. Rogues can be decent if they're still trucking along fine while the wizard is limping along pinging away with cantrips but if they have to compare to sorcerers going full nova every encounter? They're dead weight. It sucks to be dead weight. 5.*e fundamentally isn't balanced for few encounters per long rest.

2. It makes fights take too long. If you have fewer fights then to challenge the PCs to tend to need bigger smashier fights. Having a single fight that goes on and on and on and on makes me bored. Now with the PCs having much better in-combat healing, 5.5e big fights will presumably take longer. Now I don't mind a big climactic fight at the end of an arc, but having that be the default is prettying trying.

3. It pushes players towards prioritizing cookie cutter nova strategies. Start every fight with your big gun concentration spell, etc. etc. Some of these nova strategies have been taken off the table (for paladins especially) but I'm sure people will find others.

4. If you have fewer bigger battles the casters simply don't have enough rounds to use all of their spells in combat, which means that they can use a LOT more spells out combat. I played in some more social/investigative adventures and the sheer amount of muscle that casters could bring to out of combat problems when they didn't have fights draining away their spell slots made it really dispiriting to play a fighter.

Overall, I HATED how bad class balance got in 3.5e and liked how the classes were less unbalanced in 5e, but if you have really few fights then casters stomp on everyone's faces.

 

[Daztur]

The increase in healing for healing spells in 5.5 is needed, the 5e ones were a little too weak to be really useful. I would have preferred something more like 4e healing but that ship has long ago sailed

I disagree with the entire premise of this thread.

I don't want healing to be useful in the middle of combat. If healing becomes useful in combat, it becomes mandatory in combat, and I just don't like having to force anyone into the healer slot of a party.

Also the metric used is entirely wrong for making healing useful in combat to begin with. You need to measure the Action economy of how much you can heal with one action VS how much damage a monster can deal with an action. And you want it to be at a greater than 3 to 1 ratio to make up for the fact you had to turn your action into a heal, had to pay for the heal, and need to make headway against attrition to make it worth your while.

Which has nothing to do with total hp percentages per day.

I don't think either of you are really disagreeing just talking about different things. You're both talking about healing output per action, tactical healing. I'm more talking about healing output per day, strategic healing. You can set up an RPG in which characters are trash at one and great at the other.

My main concern here (and why I wrote up this thread) was about strategic healing and how that's being increased. This means that attritioning down a party over a series of fights until they run out of resources is now going to take longer in 5.5e than in 5e, which is annoying to me as I thought that this already took too long in 5e. This is a completely separate issue from how much healing you can pump out during an in-combat emergency.

 

[Ashrym]

In my experience 5e doesn't work well with adventuring days build around fewer encounters

That depends on how large and structured those encounters are. I add timed events on subsequent rounds in large encounters, for example.

 

[Daztur]

That depends on how large and structured those encounters are. I add timed events on subsequent rounds in large encounters, for example.

Good point, if those encounters are very much staged like that then they can end up feeling more like a string of small fights than one big fight. I usually don't go in for that kind of detail but have had it happen a few times in recent campaigns, for example the PCs are ancient Greeks attacking the Trojan army and then Ares comes through showboating around hacking down both sides for shits and giggles and the PCs have to figure out how to survive a literal god.

 

[cbwjm]

My main concern here (and why I wrote up this thread) was about strategic healing and how that's being increased. This means that attritioning down a party over a series of fights until they run out of resources is now going to take longer in 5.5e than in 5e, which is annoying to me as I thought that this already took too long in 5e. This is a completely separate issue from how much healing you can pump out during an in-combat emergency.

I'm actually fine with that too. I think I recall someome at WotC said that they expect PCs to be largely healed between combats, this was well before 5.5. I'm more than happy for the PCs to be healed up via spells or hit dice, resources are still expended which leads to the party being worn down. I should also note that I don't typically prepare enounters expecting the party to have made it through a few already and be pretty beat up by the time of the final boss fight.

 

[James Gasik]

The fact that the system for encounter building doesn't take the amount of resources players have has always made me skeptical of the whole "attrition model" of adventuring days.

Back in the d20 days, an encounter of CR = average party level was meant to consume 25% of the party's resources. How one would model that is beyond me, since the given resources characters have vary. Everyone has hit points, but some classes have encounter abilities, other have daily abilities, and then there are consumables which are one time only abilities.

Flash forward to today, where you have to ensure that every encounter consumes 1/7th of the party's resources on average, to leave the party at exactly the right amount of resources to survive the last encounter. But imagine trying to build an encounter for a party that is exactly at 1/7th of their total resources! Such an encounter would have to be really really easy or a TPK is a given. The standard adventure model (if there is such a thing) tends to have encounters get harder instead of easier as the adventuring "day" (week/month/year) goes on, and to do that with 6-8 (I'll just call it 7) encounters precisely is pretty much impossible. If the party gets lucky and uses less, the final encounter is easier. If they end up using more, it's certain doom.

Now if you're running that old school "death is cheap" style of game, well, none of this matters. Death lurks around every corner, and a TPK isn't a "fail state" for the campaign.

However, 5e wasn't designed to have games exclusively follow this model. From the PHB:

If this sort of game is considered to be the "default" by the designers and is their starting point, then while having individual characters die might not be a fail state, a TPK could be seen as such, and thus, ought be vanishingly rare. In that case, perhaps the system's "7ish encounters" isn't actually intended to completely drain the party's resources at all, but instead, always leave the party at a level with resources to spare, to give less experienced DM's more wiggle room when the rules for encounter building fail them!

After all, one can always use more encounters or flip levers and twist dials to make the game harder, if that's the experience you want- but that's certainly not something every DM knows how to do with finesse! I've been game mastering for decades, and I still haven't mastered it!

So things like plentiful healing and generous recharge rules aren't a bug at all, but a feature of 5e. Players generally winning most of the time and not dying is the intended play loop, and to argue that it isn't is simply ignoring the facts.

If you don't want this in your game, you have to change it. WotC isn't "Anti-DM", as the DM certainly has the power to enforce any sort of rulings they wish (subject to the breaking point of your player's endurance). It's default mode is simply not to some people's tastes, but that's ok as long as you recognize this fact and take steps to do something about it. 5e is fairly easy to kitbash (perhaps too much so).

Now if you don't want to go to that effort, or you think your players will balk at it, that's certainly a problem, but not one 5e is really designed to solve (but here's hoping the new DMG will address this in more detail).

The change to healing has nothing to do with game balance- balancing the game is, at best, a secondary concern for the designers (as far as I can tell). It's about providing an experience where choosing to use healing magic feels more like a valid option. Because looking at 5e, it has many inferior options to choose from. Some things are just better than other things. If a choice is bad, you learn not to take that choice, you find ways to stubbornly optimize that choice anyways, or you ask your DM to fix it.

I don't, personally, think that's a great way to make a game, but nobody asked me to make D&D, lol. It's merely the game as it exists. All that's happened here is that healing is a better choice than it was.

It remains to be seen if that makes it a good choice.

 

[Clint_L]

So, I don’t find severe balance issues in play based around big encounters. I run a lot of games, and spellcasters don’t dominate. Rogues are effective. There are some encounters that favour one class or another, but I’m not finding a problem with players struggling to make meaningful contributions.

In general, spellcasters tend to be more feast or famine. They can have an outsized impact when things go their way - a key save is failed, for example - but they are also much more likely to have battles where their contribution is minimal - the key save is made, and so on.

I’ve also watched almost every episode of Critical Role and Dimension 20, among others. Very much big encounter storytelling and every class consistently makes meaningful contributions. So in my experience, 5e handles this well enough. I think it comes down to the style the group prefers.