D&D 5E The Return of the HealBot

[MoonSong]

When the designers design the game they assume that players will have access to healing of some sort. They assume players can heal in the middle of deadly situations. "Play whatever you want but be aware that unless you play X the game design will fall apart." is ridiculous.

People should not just be allowed to play whatever they want to play, they should be encouraged to play whatever they want to play. Make people WANT to play clerics.

Well some of us love (or loved) to play clerics. Back in the old times when you could preppare only heals and actually do a valuable contribution to the team. Now a days you are just geting in the way unless you are hitting and inflicting damage. For those who loated being the cleric it was liberating -you no longer needed an action to heal and could do things other than healing- but for us who liked playing the healer it was one of the worst things to happen, it devaluated the role in terrible ways -now you were forced to heal AND do other things, just healing wasn't enough, you went from being a welcomed and valuable team member to being a drama killer, and even then you no longer got to enjoy being the healer, the "healing is an aftereffect" was just bad. Allow me to just heal and be done with it damn it! I don't want to hit and heal, or push a friend and heal,or tie shoelaces and heal I just want to focus on being a good healer and be a valuable team member instead of worrying about accuracy and dps just to carry my own weight.

 

[bogmad]

I'm really liking GrahamWills solution:

At the risk of being laughed at, the MMO DCUO solved this by having healing powers only available after you had had enough hits. This would be a cool cleric system -- your domain determines when you can heal: war domain, only after hitting someone, sun domain, after casting a radiant spell, etc. Make it a free action after the domain-based trigger. The you still have the choice of action, but the other players WANT you to have fun so you can heal. Heck, the fighter will probably take a blow to give you a flank to ensure your god will grant you a heal when you hit the enemy!

Let each cleric have a certain amount of resources for healing (whether at-will, encounter or daily based). Add in some extra domain rules that stipulate the conditions for healing, letting the "healing" domains do what the classic cleric does perhaps slightly better than other domains, and make the math (roughly) equal out so that the sun cleric's radiant damage (or whatever a domain's trigger is) balances for the extra effect.

 

[n00bdragon]

Idea get: Go with the "must do a thing to heal" cleric. Then put in a "Healing God Cleric" who must heal people to heal people. The more he heals and the more often he heals the better he heals.

There. Instant healbot. Want to healbot? Here's your man. And best of all not everyone who plays cleric is forced to be the healbot if they don't want to. They can heal the party AND be effective at other things if they choose.

 

[Stormonu]

Why not split the difference?

Do the initial design with the idea of healing spells that take an action. Let's say Cure Light Wounds; heals 1d8.

Then make at least one spell per level that does healing + another effect. For example, Sunmote. Target takes 1d4 (fire) damage, an adjacent ally heals 1d4. Higher level spells may do more - say like Purifying Fire; Area of effect - enemies take Xd6 fire damage, allies are healed for Yd6.

Players can then choose to go purely defensive as healbots, mix it up a little bit or play offensively with good ol' attack spells and the like.

 

[MoonSong]

Why not split the difference?

Do the initial design with the idea of healing spells that take an action. Let's say Cure Light Wounds; heals 1d8.

Then make at least one spell per level that does healing + another effect. For example, Sunmote. Target takes 1d4 (fire) damage, an adjacent ally heals 1d4. Higher level spells may do more - say like Purifying Fire; Area of effect - enemies take Xd6 fire damage, allies are healed for Yd6.

Players can then choose to go purely defensive as healbots, mix it up a little bit or play offensively with good ol' attack spells and the like.

Please no more "heal and do something else" spells, they really devaluate the value of pure "Just heal" spells

 

[kerleth]

I respectfully disagree kailurker. They don't by definition devalue them. It's just that they have to be balanced against each other properly, so that the additional effect doesn't completely overshadow the extra healing power/versatility/whatever.

 

[Stalker0]

Well some of us love (or loved) to play clerics. Back in the old times when you could preppare only heals and actually do a valuable contribution to the team. Now a days you are just geting in the way unless you are hitting and inflicting damage.

There are definitely people out there who love to be healers, and god bless everyone of them. I would think that they are in the minority however. For the rest of us "violent" people, we like to do some damage in our combat.

Now should a class be made that caters to the heal and more heal crowd? Absolutely. But I don't think it should be one of the core 4 classes.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

You could make a system like expertise dice for channel divinity:

It may be daily, but otherwise you can spend dice on turning undead or healing as you like

 

[Li Shenron]

D&D Next seems to have gone in the direction that healing is going to be a key part of the game. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's mandatory to have a healing cleric in your group, but it certainly is optimal and therefore will feel mandatory for many.

What healing do you mean here? If you mean Cleric's healing, then this may be true if you are coming from 4e where AFAIK there are plenty of options to heal yourself automatically and there are many classes which can heal others.

But if you are coming from any earlier edition, 5e has MORE healing than ever out-of-combat, so a healing cleric is certainly not more needed than it was before and possibly less.

 

[Chris_Nightwing]

I'm going to try to rulify my suggestions, so they can be poked at.

Rituals
The first important thing is that Rituals are divided into categories, or given relevant keywords, so that they are accessible according to your skill training. Most relevant to what I am writing here is that there will be healing rituals, suggested as follows:

Cure Light Wounds (requires training in Heal)
This ritual takes 5 minutes to complete and requires 10gp worth of medicinal components such as herbs, salves, gauze and thread. It restores a number of hitpoints equal to the Wisdom modifier + Heal check bonus of the person perfoming the ritual to a single patient, who may be themselves. A patient healed by this ritual cannot regain any more hitpoints from another Cure Wounds ritual until they are again significantly injured.*

Cure Moderate Wounds (requires training in Heal)
This ritual takes 5 minutes to complete and requires 50gp worth of magical and medicinal components such as herbs, salves, blessed gauze and thread. It restores a number of hitpoints equal to 10 + the Wisdom modifier + Heal check bonus of the person perfoming the ritual to a single patient, who may be themselves. A patient healed by this ritual cannot regain any more hitpoints from another Cure Wounds ritual until they are again significantly injured.*

Cure Serious Wounds (requires training in Heal)
This ritual takes 5 minutes to complete and requires 250gp worth of magical components such as rare herbs, blessed salves and holy water. It restores a number of hitpoints equal to 25 + the Wisdom modifier + Heal check bonus of the person perfoming the ritual to a single patient, who may be themselves. A patient healed by this ritual cannot regain any more hitpoints from another Cure Wounds ritual until they are again significantly injured.*

The costs and amounts restored are very hard to judge at the moment, but you get the idea. *denotes that you shouldn't play silly buggers and deal 1HP damage to someone just to cure them some more - I tried to avoid a direct GP-to-HP conversion, so that cheap rituals are more efficient, and the advantage of the higher rituals is time-saving. Parties will naturally start with Light rituals, but as they gain HP and start taking bigger hits, they should value more effective, if expensive, healing. I've also considered the cost of a potion, 25gp, which is the other healing option. Potions should generally be more expensive, since they are available in combat.Speaking of which, crafting such potions should be a ritual, not a feat.

By default there will be no Cleric spells that restore HP, though I would favour a cantrip that prevents bleeding at a distance, for downed allies. A Cleric of the Lifegiver, however, would channel divinity, or have a domain feature, or domain spells that do heal. My preference would be the use of channel divinity, restoring HP at around the same values as level-appropriate potions - in effect this Cleric saves the party actions and gold by becoming a walking potion-fountain. I would offer all Clerics the option to pick Heal as a trained skill over a Knowledge, so that in theory any Cleric can still fulfil the healer role.