D&D (2024) The Problem with Healing Powercreep

[evilbob]

Rogues are effective.

Indeed: given that sneak attack is basically expected every turn and how much rogues handle in the exploration and social pillars, I've never seen rogues feel left out.

Generally I agree with Clint_L's take: I think that while 3.5 really, really struggled with the "5 min adventuring day" and how to balance that, for reasons that appear better in play than in maths, it hasn't been an issue with 5e, at least in my experience. Maybe it's because of concentration or hard limits on casting slotted spells or some other smaller tweaks we aren't giving enough credit to, but I can't remember the last time my players fought more than 3 battles in a day and it hasn't made anyone too exceptional - except paladins, oddly enough. But I think 5e paladins were widely considered too strong, especially in the level 5-10 range, and from what I'm seeing 5.5 is trying to bring everyone else to that level.

Then again, maybe it's also because I've never had a group make it past level 13 in 5e, so I've not dealt much with end-game play.

 

[tetrasodium]

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).

That bold bit rather significantly clashes with a point about 5e's overall design that has already been made. The PCs don't actually need that treasure after about tier1 or so of play for anything because the monsters are all designed for low level parties equipped with starting gear. Far too much of 5e (including two actual classes) is designed in ways to roll out the red carpet for players to nova>rest>repeat with no consequences beyond narrative ones they can ignore right up until the GM drives a spike through the campaign.

 

[jmartkdr2]

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.

I generally agree. The only times I’ve seen “too few encounters “ become a problem is when players can assume that this first fight of the day will be the only one before the next long rest - if they have any reason to conserve resources, then the game can be balanced (with enough work from the dm - too much work, really, but that’s a different thread.)

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

Of course.

My more objective issue is that 5e has both slow combat (relative to TSR-D&D) and doesn't work well unless you have a lot of encounters per long rest.

This means that often you can't end a session with a long rest which is a real pain for me for real world logistical concerns. If your player roster shifts every week because of real life it's soooooo convenient to end a session with a long rest.

Ah. Yes - This would cause definite problems.
Assuming a ~4 hour evening session, there is no way you can fit a balanced adventuring day in there. Unless your group are very efficient in decision-making and rolling during combat, you're not going to get nearly enough fights in , let alone non-combat encounters, general roleplay and shenanigans, and (especially) puzzles.

 

[Daztur]

Ah. Yes - This would cause definite problems.
Assuming a ~4 hour evening session, there is no way you can fit a balanced adventuring day in there. Unless your group are very efficient in decision-making and rolling during combat, you're not going to get nearly enough fights in , let alone non-combat encounters, general roleplay and shenanigans, and (especially) puzzles.

Yup, this is very group dependent of course. When I run games with my two sons I can do a full adventuring day in under two hours no problems as long as their characters are lower level. A full group of adults during our normal 3 hour session? Yeah, that's not going to work well with people getting snacks, lots of table chatter, people getting sidetracked etc. etc. And with adults you're usually NOT going to get the exact same roster every time (due to family issues cropping up etc.).

So with 5e I end up with a choice between:
1. Having few fights per long rest. I don't like this.
2. Having the roster of players swap out randomly in the middle of a dungeon. I don't like this.
3. Me turning PCs into NPCs. Workable but my players don't like this.
4. So my general solution has been "you're on a boat/caravan/airship!" so the PCs are basically the "away team" and any PCs whose players can't make it are on the ship and can be swapped in and out with relative ease.

Still, would like it to just be possible to attrit down a party properly in one session and 5.5e makes that harder than in 5e.

 

[Daztur]

I generally agree. The only times I’ve seen “too few encounters “ become a problem is when players can assume that this first fight of the day will be the only one before the next long rest - if they have any reason to conserve resources, then the game can be balanced (with enough work from the dm - too much work, really, but that’s a different thread.)

Yes, that's just the thing. If the players get in the habit of frequent rests they don't conserve resources which tends to unbalance the game. Honestly, I've found this to be an even bigger issue out of combat than in combat since if, say, the bard knows that there won't be many fights this session then they can blow a whole lot of out of combat utility spells and badly outclass the poor rogue in a less combat-focused adventure.

 

[Daztur]

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.

Agreed completely with this first part. Although the conclusions I draw from this point seem to be a bit different from yours (see below).

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:
View attachment 378597
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.

Again mostly agreed, with some quibbles.

I'm fully on board with the idea that the 3.*e model of "we'll calibrate things so that a certain level of the party's resources are drained during each encounter so that the last encounter where the PCs are on their last legs is a REAL challenge" seems to be a fools' errand. CR simply can't be fine-tuned that precisely, certainly not in 5.*ed D&D. So what's the solution?

Old School: the solution here is very simple. The DM doesn't choose how many encounters the players will face in any given session, the players do. The simplest version of this is the classic dungeon crawl (although it can be elaborated on and complicated in many ways, it's good to have a nice simple default adventure to set expectations) where the PCs are adventuring in a dungeon that's simply FAR too big to clear in one session. In each session the PCs will want to explore a bit more of the dungeon and get more loot (because GP = XP). Walking around through already explored bits mean fighting Wandering Monsters with no treasure while delving too deep means that the PCs will end up dead. Each session the DM has no freaking clue which bit of the dungeon the PCs will choose to explore this time and the players get to choose when they turn back. Of course the players could get lost/fall down a chute/get captured and not be able to turn back when they want, but that's all part of the game. All of this means that the DM doesn't have to CARE about how many encounters there will be per day or about CR, that's the job of the PCs. This mode of play doesn't NECESSARILY involve a lot of player death, as the players can be smart and careful and each individual fight can be pretty easy while still be exciting as the easy fights may not be dangerous in and of themselves but they're FAST so they don't drag and they represent the players' resources slowly being drained away as the players wonder if they should turn back now or check out one more room, that next room might have enough treasure to let them level up after all...

4e: the best way of play 4e is with very few but very fun and challenging battles. Since attrition isn't much of a thing in 4e (certainly not if you're only doing 1-2 adventures per long rest) the DM can fine-tune the appropriate CR relatively easily to provide a real challenge. Each battle is then a chess match where there is a real possibility of the players losing or at least suffering a death. However, since there aren't that many fights and the PCs are pretty tough and CR can be much more precisely fine-tuned than in 3.*e there can be a good bit of real challenge and player skill being tested without having player deaths be especially common over the course of a campaign.

What 5*e seems to be moving towards: most fights (except some boss fights) aren't a meaningful challenge to player skill. They don't represent a drain to resources (since players are assumed to be able to refill their resources) and they don't represent a meaningful challenge in and of themselves since if each fight has a meaningful chance of leading to player defeat or death you're going to end up with a LOT more dead PCs than 5e assumes. Therefore from the point of view of testing player skill, most fights end up being a lot like random fights in old Final Fantasy games, no real challenge in and of themselves and also not draining the PCs down for the boss since you can rest up right before the boss. They tend mainly serve to be story beats, let the PCs show off and have fun being ass kickers. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. I'm in a really fun Blades in the Dark campaign and the focus is more on telling a wild story, the fights aren't really mean to be gamey tests of player skill but that's OK. My crazy old witchy PC is having a great time slowly turning herself into a living spirit well. Good times.

However that third solution that 5e seems to be turning towards just isn't what I want out of D&D, if I want to scratch that itch I'll do it better with an AW game or BitD or FATE or somesuch. I want D&D to be a gamey game that tests player skill and cunning and 5e seems to be turning in the direction of serving up a series of trash mobs so that most fights don't serve as any meaningful challenge of player skill.

With 5e I felt that the game wasn't designed with my preferences in mind but was enough of a compromise to meet me halfway and then I could get the rest of the way to where I wanted to go by being a decent DM. With 5.5e it seems like more and more of the basic assumptions the devs have about how the game should be run are fighting against how I want to run the game. If Old School D&D is more Combat as War and 4e was more Combat as Sport, then 5e seems to be heading towards Combat as Dance, fun and maybe selling a good story, but not really focused on serving up a gamey challenge.

 

[Daztur]

That bold bit rather significantly clashes with a point about 5e's overall design that has already been made. The PCs don't actually need that treasure after about tier1 or so of play for anything because the monsters are all designed for low level parties equipped with starting gear. Far too much of 5e (including two actual classes) is designed in ways to roll out the red carpet for players to nova>rest>repeat with no consequences beyond narrative ones they can ignore right up until the GM drives a spike through the campaign.

I don't think that 5.*e is really designed for nova rest repeat at all (see how much rogues suck in such a scenario). It is true that a lot of people do play the game that way, but I think that that's a problem with the design of 5e not how it was supposed to be.

As for motivating people to take more risks and making gold more meaningful, well GP = XP is far and away the best single rule that has ever been invented for D&D.

Indeed: given that sneak attack is basically expected every turn

Rogue sneak attack damage provides a nice baseline when casters run out of spells and have to fall back onto plinking away with cantrips. Rogue sneak attack damage is utter garbage when compared to casters going nova.

and how much rogues handle in the exploration and social pillars, I've never seen rogues feel left out.

If a bard isn't having their spell slots drained down by a string of combats, then they can run absolute rings around rogues in social and exploration scenes due to having a lot of boosts to spells and then a whole bunch of spell slots on top of that.

Generally I agree with Clint_L's take: I think that while 3.5 really, really struggled with the "5 min adventuring day" and how to balance that, for reasons that appear better in play than in maths, it hasn't been an issue with 5e, at least in my experience.

My experience has been different from yours then. For my own personal experiences, the difference between how 5e plays when you have 1-2 encounters per long rest vs. 3-6 was like night and day in terms of how enjoyable it was to play a martial character. Felt like an utter sidekick as a fighter in one long campaign. I did not enjoy that and will try to avoid playing in/running such a campaign in the future.

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.

Your experience has been very different from mine then. I can only base my own preferences on my own experiences. And I don't think I'm alone here. You had LOTS AND LOTS of people complaining about 5 Minute Adventuring Days in 3.5e and the exact same problems persist in 5e (although concentration does take a little bit of an edge off).

Let's do a mental experiment. Let's say that the PCs have bottomless healing potion so they can heal to full as many times as they want. If, under those conditions, you had 1,001 fights between long rests then the rogue would easily outclass the wizard since the wizard would run out of spells and be plinkng away with cantrips while the rogue would keep on trucking forever with sneak attacks. Now take the opposite extreme: a complete 5 Minute Adventuring Day in which the PCs do NOTHING WHATSOEVER except for having one big fight. In that Five Minute Adventuring Day condition the casters could just let loose completely with their most powerful spells and hold nothing back. Under those conditions the casters would EASILY do more damage than the rogue and have a lot more utility on top of that.

Now somewhere between the 5 Minute Adventuring Day and the Day of 1,001 Fights you hit the sweet spot where the wizard's spell slots get spread thin enough that they just can keep up with the reliability of sneak attack damage. But that sweet spot sure as hell isn't at three fights per day. Casters just get faaaaaaaaaaaaaaar too many spell slots under those conditions to not be well ahead of rogues and under those conditions rogues would be handicapped much like monks in campaigns where there are no short rests are heavily handicapped. Have I seen people have fun with monks in campaigns with very few/no short rests? Sure. A lot of people don't really keep track of how much damage each character is doing and don't really notice the tactical situation, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a SERIOUS power imbalance in those conditions.

 

[tetrasodium]

I don't think that 5.*e is really designed for nova rest repeat at all (see how much rogues suck in such a scenario). It is true that a lot of people do play the game that way, but I think that that's a problem with the design of 5e not how it was supposed to be.

It very much collapses with a 5mwd yes, but that doesn't stop it from being designed in ways that remove just about everything mechanical consequence that could get in the way after ignoring the narrative consequences or having two different classes designed to encourage in a 5mwd while providing a "my class is designed to neeeeed those rests excuse.

As for motivating people to take more risks and making gold more meaningful, well GP = XP is far and away the best single rule that has ever been invented for D&D.

I don't believe that the system itself can claim any credit for that particular sort of house rule pulled from the oldest editions & shadow dark. Why would it be part of a discussion about d&d 5e? Even using it would pretty much load a pair of nails in the gm's campaign ending nail gun if it's done expecting to convince players to not nova>rest>repeat after they've decided that type of homelander-esque level of power fantasy is what wotc designed to encourage players to force.

 

[AnotherGuy]

I'm not a fan of 4e's Healing Surges from a thematic standpoint. You're telling me the power of a deity cannot heal you unless you have reserves?

Sounds like 5.5e made the situation worse. The easiest fix is to use the healing from 5e and ignore 5.5e's healing spells.
If your problem was the in combat healing in 5e, start by dropping the healing dice by 1 category, a d8 becomes d6...etc
And introduce Travel Rests (8 hours, only removes 1 level of exhaustion, regain 1/2 HD) and change Long Rest to 24hrs in safe and comfortable surroundings.