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Message: <blockquote data-quote="nightwalker450" data-source="post: 6039659" data-attributes="member: 94895">I think the healing issue is more one of perceptions, and intents.Players wish to be as safe as possible, so they will want as much healing available as they can (all healing spell clerics). The GM's want their combats to have meaning, to impact the players, and make them fear for their characters' lives. GM escalates damage/creatures, players escalate healing, an arms race. The more a GM wants to run a "gritty" game, the more the players will go defensive and healing.I think the best solution is instead of focusing on healing, we should think more along the lines of damage prevention. Give the players some form to pull back their damage output, while decreasing their incoming damage. This would go a long ways to reducing the arms race. The GM would then be able to see that the players are feeling that "gritty" tension, because they are fighting defensively. The players as well wouldn't feel the need to escalate as much because they would have some option to throttle the damage.The problem with using healing for this, is that all the DM sees is the players healing back up after everything and therefore he doesn't feel he's being as effective as he should be. He doesn't take into account the reason the players have all those healing spells is because they know what type of DM they have. So the "gritty" feel was taken care of in character creation, not in the individual combat.Unfortunately almost all editions have only had an off or on switch for defensive fighting. You either are attacking, or you are dodging (and practically nobody dodges). 5e with the maneuvers of parry or deadly strike are getting closer but it needs to be available for everyone. Combat Expertise of 3e and the berserker of 4e (though the player has less control over it), are as close as we've come.I'd say use disadvantage on your attacks to give all your opponents disadvantage on theirs, but over using advantage/disadvantage is making the status more and more useless. Maybe a penalty to your own damage (no modifiers?) in order to reduce incoming damage by 1 Hit Dice would be an effective way. I don't know if this is the proper way, but I think the key is we need to look at a different dimension than we currently are.</blockquote>

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