D&D 5E Those who come from earlier editions, why are you okay with 5E healing (or are you)?

[Oofta]

Strange, the group I had tried with an (almost) all mage was one that I would not like to see again too. But for a very different reason. They were plowing through adventures like crazy. Nothing was stopping them, even a beholder was not enough... It was second edition at that time. Human mage, human mage, Half elf cleric/magic user, Elf (mage/thief), Elf fighter/mage and... a dwarf fighter (go figure). Calling initiative and hearing Fire ball, fire ball, ice storm, cone of cold and lightning bolt being cast was quite a sight, especially when the dwarf was saying: "I'll wait and kill whatever survive, IF something survives...). By the end, they all had wands, staves and whatever was needed to do their trade. It was quite a group.

No silly multi classing with Mages R Us! Pure mages, every one.

They would have rocked at higher levels

 

[Helldritch]

No silly multi classing with Mages R Us! Pure mages, every one.

They would have rocked at higher levels

As the dwarf said: "A mage's a mage." and a second quote: "And they leave nothing for me to bring my axe on. Damn mages...."

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

OK. Like a skill challenge-type thing to treat a serious injury? Or a sidequest to find a specific item needed to clear a festering wound?
That sort of thing?

Right, you can use what is called the 'disease track'. In my 4e-hack (HoML) I generalized it and call it 'Afflictions', and wound is one of the types of affliction I call out and give examples of. So, in 4e you could inflict a wound as a consequence of a failed SC, or of just a failure in a check, depending on the scale of the challenge and whatnot. You could also inflict them based on whatever criteria you wish in combat (character goes below zero, takes bloodied value or more in damage from one attack, etc.). I actually favor a more refined approach where the player can ELECT to get a wound, maybe to avoid some damage, or in order to avoid some other setback or gain some advantage (IE you grab your opponents blade with your bare hand in order to prevent him from finishing off your buddy).

I'm missing something. What are the lies told about older editions?

He claims it is a 'lie' that HP weren't taken to be and intended (except for what Gygax stated outright) as 'meat'. I don't agree with his position, but there are a few cases where things are phrased in a way that might encourage that (mostly the Cure Light/Serious/Critical Wounds spells). It seems a weak argument to me.

A "hit" has never actually been a "hit" outside of instances like 3e's Touch AC. But what do you mean by "propaganda?

Another variation of the 'lies' hypothesis... Claiming that until 4e every hit meant a weapon connected with flesh, period. This is pretty much trivially falsifiable IMHO. I think however it is fair to say that, in all editions including 4e and 5e, the default assumption is that 'hit' indicates an effective attack of some sort, usually taken to be a weapon connecting with the target. However, even in 1e this is simply not arguable as an absolute. When Cargorn, my 12th level Ranger with 80+ hit points gets hit by a monster that does 2d6 damage on that attack and takes 9 damage, did he just get run through with the ogre's spear? Of course not, even though that would be an unsurvivable blow for most level 1 or 2 PCs and would certainly justify exactly that narrative. No, it would almost certainly be narrated as some sort of strong attack, and probably not really explained in more detail. Surely @Saelorn isn't suggesting that Cargorn, by 'good narrative' walks out of the battle with 8 of these ogres at 12 hit points with 6 or 7 of these spears transfixing his body? I have to assume any other result is falling into his definition of this 'lie', in which case I simply reject the whole proposition in its entirety!

If having to rest for multiple long rests are handled no differently than having to rest for one, what is the actual difference on play? (I'm using "rest" instead of "day" because needing a week or similar for a long rest is an official variant that seems to be commonly used.

I can imagine what it would look like. I just don't see what the effective difference is between waiting for one rest and waiting for several. - Apart from the spellcasters getting multiple recoveries of spells back while the injured characters are still recovering.

How is that distinction different from changing the rest period? It would just mean that spellcaster resources become more available than the HP of the melee-type characters.

That sounds like the exact same dynamic as my groups, with the only difference being that spells are depleted as well as hit points. The party will generally try to rest when one or the other (but usually both) are getting low.

Do you feel that in 5e, a healer is not valued and that managing the allocation of healing resources (spells, class abilities, HD, potions etc) is not (or maybe just less) important?

Definitely have little to add to your analysis on this whole point. All changing frequency of resource recovery does is force the DM/players to alter the length of the time periods they use in their fiction. That might provide some impetus to have things go a different way, but the truth is that in most games the 'reality' is pretty ill-defined and whether the orcs will take 2 hours or 2 days to decide to clear out and head into the mountains is pretty much an arbitrary choice. Maybe it matters now and then in some aesthetic sense, but usually it doesn't make much difference to anyone.

 

[Lanefan]

What I found though, was that 4e creates the huge potential for a sort of 'gonzo' type of super-dynamic encounters where you can pretty much just unleash your inner Steven Spielberg and build very action-packed and thrilling encounters. This largely falls flat in something like 1e, where the chance a player is going to take the risk of doing some crazy action hero stuff is low since the risk of hit point loss is a big problem.

Actually I've found that some of the big set-piece battles I've converted from 4e to 1e have worked out quite well in play, provided I adjust things a bit to maintain a decent degree of threat beyond round 2.

The other problem being that the vague rules mean who knows what the risks really are?

Which makes in-character sense, as the character might well not know all the risks either. End result is the same either way: you either go for broke or you don't.

 

[Lanefan]

However, they can end up in a series of choices where every outcome is negative, or where they are stuck in a repeating cycle of events that they have no power to overcome.

For example, I believe it was earlier in this thread where someone pointed out they had a 3.5 game where they were using the natural healing rules, but were caught out in the wilderness. They bunkered up, but before they could fully heal, a random encounter occured that dropped their hp back down. So, they bunkered up again, and the same happened.

The players have no recourse in this scenario, unless they have a cleric or other healer. Because in the time it takes them to heal, they are attacked and brought back down into dangerous territory.

A long time ago I had a party in just this situation. They'd gone into a dungeon adventure, got clobbered, and backed out to rest for a day or two. Thing was, they didn't back away quite far enough and thus had a couple of rather nasty encounters appear during their attempted rest - leading to this quote from one of the players:

"If we rest up and recuperate here long enough we'll all be dead."

So they backed off a bit further, rested up, and away they went...

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

1st, I really like your post.
And yet, there must be a balance between what we had in 1ed and what we have now. I like the fact that now a healbot is no longer required but at the same time, healing overnight is way too fast (without the help of magic) and can easily lead to the 5mwd and unthinking tactics because "Hey! Who cares? We'll get healed overnight". We (I?) want to play heroic narrative, not a cartoonesque one.

I want to see heroes at my table, not reckless, unthinking whirlwinds. I want the heroes to beat the big bad guys but yet I want them to fear for their lives. We now have a variety of groups. In older edition a four man party was like: 1 fighter, 1 cleric, 1 rogue, 1 wizard. Sometimes the rogue was replaced by a fighter/wizard/thief or a fighter/thief. The fighter could be replaced either by a barbarian, cavalier, or ranger (in rarer instances we could see the odd ranger/cleric and if stats were there, a paladin). Never or almost, were the full cleric (sometimes a druid but even then....) and wizard (I think I saw only one illusionnist in 1ed era) replaced by something else.

Only a fifth or sixth character would bring a much needed diversity. This is where we could see various multiclass races appear like a gnome illusionist/thief, a monk, a druid or whatever else would fit the party and the players at that time.

Now we can have varied party for almost no risk of tpk, which is good. On the other hand, I feel that a riskless environment promotes bad thinking. I want to see players feel the need for magical healing. And if they don't have it, then I want to see them think twice before charging in that room full of goblins/kobolds/orcs or whatever.

Yeah, I agree, resource planning (and other sorts too) are traditional parts of the D&D skillset. I don't have a problem with that, and it CAN co-exist, to an extent, with heroic 'action adventure' type play. After all, at some level the tension of the game only comes to fruition when SOMETHING is at stake, often the PCs themselves.

I just don't think that the change from, lets say, 3e to 4e, erased this aspect of the game. Consider a 1st level 4e party. They have buckled up and found 'Kobold Hall' (a sample adventure in the DMG) and now they're headed in! They have something like 6 or 7 HS each on average, and somewhere in the range of 20 HP. There's a cleric, so they can unleash a couple HS during combat (plus 2nd Wind if you really want, pretty much a dwarf thing though).

They enter the first encounter area, there will be SOME sort of attrition here, possibly something significant if one of the PCs is foolish or really unlucky. They will have to decide if they want to burn up their daily powers (each PC has one) or not, but probably not, because there's a resource game there!

Now they go on to the next couple of encounters, pretty much the same sort of questions, little bit tougher encounters with a variety of tactical situations. Clever play (avoiding traps, boldly advancing in the ball ball room when you realize what the tactical situation is, etc.) should reward the party with preserving their resources.

Encounter 4 is a bit more of a dilemma, its a tough encounter with complex terrain. Do you burn your best stuff here? It is hard for the PCs to know if anything else comes after. There isn't really a 100% 'right' answer here, nor is there a right answer to pressing on from here. Does the party turn back? There's no 'ticking clock', but presumably it is worth maximizing their treasure take. Yet a dead PC won't get much...

This is a pretty stock dungeon crawl really. It works fine in 4e in terms of resource depletion feeding into risk vs possible rewards (will the rest of the kobold tribe slip away with all the treasure if you rest). I don't see how it works differently from its 1e counterpart really, except the 'long rest' you might take is GUARANTEED to be 8 hours, whereas in 1e it would depend on the amount of damage taken vs how many CLW your cleric has left, etc. It could be a 2-day wait there.

I'd note that in no case does the dungeon tell you how to deal with this. The final 'big bad' White Dragon baby encounter isn't really explained in terms of whether the dragon will take off if the PCs don't push all the way to that last encounter. OTOH if they do, it is a badass encounter, which can easily TPK a depleted party (or even once in a while one that is simply unlucky and unskilled).

Not sure that 4e is really 'off the ranch' in comparison to earlier E's... 5e would play pretty much the same as well.

 

[Helldritch]

A long time ago I had a party in just this situation. They'd gone into a dungeon adventure, got clobbered, and backed out to rest for a day or two. Thing was, they didn't back away quite far enough and thus had a couple of rather nasty encounters appear during their attempted rest - leading to this quote from one of the players:

"If we rest up and recuperate here long enough we'll all be dead."

So they backed off a bit further, rested up, and away they went...

Exactly what is happening in all of my games. If the players do not prepare a safe retreat spot to rest, they know they will be in deep sh*t, way in over their heads.

I tend to enforce the 6-8 encounters per day. An encounter is not necessarily a fight, a fight can be avoided and depending on the type of avoidance, it can give a few experience points. A hard encounter counts as two, a deadly one counts as three. But if a deadly one becomes too easy for some reasons (bad luck from the vilains or a streak of game changing good luck) I count the deadly encounter for two. Players have no way of knowing how many encounters they will face so they take a safe sound approach to resting.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I tried an all mage party in 2E, it did not end well. Group of 5 wizard-type PCs all level 3 were TPKed by a pair of low level (CR 1 equivalent) thugs.

The players decided never again.

They didn't each hire 4 men-at-arms? Yeah, that was their mistake... Admittedly, this kind of thing was not as clearly indicated as the optimum party strategy in 2e, but the actual rules were pretty much the same as in 1e. If they pooled their money they could probably even hire a leveled fighter to lead their little company. With 5 Magic Users they should be able to drop at least one spell in each of 5 encounters, should be quite enough to do the trick!
More advanced play might get you an MU/Thief or MU/Cleric for added flex (I really like the MU/Cleric option since they start with full casting abilities of both classes, which if you have a decent INT and WIS is pretty kickass).

 

[Helldritch]

They didn't each hire 4 men-at-arms? Yeah, that was their mistake... Admittedly, this kind of thing was not as clearly indicated as the optimum party strategy in 2e, but the actual rules were pretty much the same as in 1e. If they pooled their money they could probably even hire a leveled fighter to lead their little company. With 5 Magic Users they should be able to drop at least one spell in each of 5 encounters, should be quite enough to do the trick!
More advanced play might get you an MU/Thief or MU/Cleric for added flex (I really like the MU/Cleric option since they start with full casting abilities of both classes, which if you have a decent INT and WIS is pretty kickass).

Yep, hirelings were often forgotten but they could help you out quite a lot. Especially at the beginning of your adventuring career. Where are the days of "Let's rent a cleric at the local temple!"?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yep, hirelings were often forgotten but they could help you out quite a lot. Especially at the beginning of your adventuring career. Where are the days of "Let's rent a cleric at the local temple!"?

Exactly. In fact I would argue (and we have tested this) that the most effective party in AD&D is all Magic User, or maybe with a cleric and/or druid thrown in. Thieves and fighters are easily hired and its rare that you need anything exceptional there if there's enough spell firepower around. This grows exponentially more true at higher levels, and you can almost trace how the groups that Gary ran for organized around wizards as the main PCs.