D&D General Was there ever a time healing as a percentage and not a die amount?

[Umbran]

... Or that doesn't use 9 levels of spells.
I mean, in the Dying Earth, there were essentially two levels of spells.

Building an entire magic system around making healing exactly the way you want it seems... a tad extreme.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Building an entire magic system around making healing exactly the way you want it seems... a tad extreme.

Then go with "just don't put a healing spell at every level, that was how 1e did it, anyway."

 

[Yaarel]

Consider one augmentable spell.

Heal ≈ caster level x 10%

Slot level 1: 10%
Slot level 2: 30%
Slot level 3: 50%
Slot level 4: 70%
Slot level 5: 90%
Slot level 6 = Heal spell, 100%

 

[Ath'kethin]

In my games healing does 100% of its possible effect. Few things suck more than having the cleric roll all 1s on a cure spell.

When I'm playing with my 6yo, a healing potion tops off your hit points, however hurt you are. There's no sense in crushing the kid's enjoyment and enthusiasm for the game.

 

[Fanaelialae]

I see what you're getting at, but I think we can use math to disprove the existence of such a sweet spot, at least as far as D&D is concerned. At the lowest point where the level 1 spell would still be useful to a level 1 character (let's say 25%, which is about 2hp), it's already overpowered when cast on a level 20 character (restoring 50hp is too good of an effect for a level 1 spell slot).

Given that our arbitrary starting point yields an unbalanced result, and we can't raise or lower that starting point without making it even less balanced for one of the groups, we can safely conclude that such a sweet spot doesn't exist.

Ah, yes. It would be much easier to fit percentile healing into a game that was actually designed for it. At the very least, it would be helpful if your HP total didn't vary by a factor of twenty over the course of gameplay.

Like I said, I wasn't talking about 5e.

I think that you can absolutely have such a sweet spot in a system that's designed for it. Let's say that HP and damage scale such that for any given level, it takes X hits from a level appropriate creature to knock you to 0. If we then have the basic healing spell heal Y percentage of HP, it will heal the same number of "hits" at low levels as at high levels. Who cares whether the spell heals 5 HP or 500 if it confers the same amount of survivability in practice?

Of course, the designer may desire that high level characters are more reliant on abilities than low level characters, since they presumably have more of them. To do so he might scale monster damage faster than PC HP. In other words, whereas a low level character can take X hits, the high level character can only take X - Z. In this paradigm the low level heal is good for low level characters but sub par for high level characters, despite healing the same percentage to both. That's fine since the high level character has presumably been provided with high level healing that confers the same survivability that the low level heal used to provide.