NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6701173" data-attributes="member: 996">Sure, and that's all it is.  And a dropped enemy is only dropped until someone heals it.  As long as healing is an available factor, even a dropped enemy has an expected future DPR.  That's the oddity the thread calls 'whack-a-mole.' Which is a fair assumption.  Given the availability of healing to PCs, OTOH, it's a fair assumption that they will get healed.  Whether the rules that make that a reality are unique to PCs, rare beyond the PCs, or common is a matter of campaign style.   You are certainly not alone in saying things like that.  In classic D&D, a party couldn't really succeed - get through low level - without a healer, typically a cleric.  So the assumption of PC healing was pretty nearly a given.   That wasn't really spelled out until later.  In 1e, for instance, any human who wasn't '0 level' had a character class - probably fighter, but a class.  The DMG presented fees for spellcasting as if casters of moderate or even high level were present in numbers in any city.  3e came out and said that PC classes were unusually - that most people were commoners, and most of the more exceptional ones were other NPC classes (but even one of those common NPC classes, the Adept, could heal).4e was the only version of D&D to intimate that PCs might be nearly unique in possessing a lot of healing resources (Surges, second wind, leader powers). Either suicidal or insane would probably be quite sufficient.  Villains and their henchlings in genre, and even fanatics of other stripes or grimmer heroes, are often willing to fight to the death and 'sell their lives dear' - which in the context of a D&D world with magical healing and raising, might very well mean 'making sure' of a fallen foe over possibly taking down a second for the few seconds he'll stay down before being healed. That's an adequate acknowledgement of the issue, I suppose.Is it really desirable for PCs to have the ability to stand eachother up from mortal wounds, and for that to be the most efficient way of approaching in-combat healing (it maximizes hps restored because of the healing-from-zero rule) or might some DMs want to tweak the rules to make it a less optimal tactic (healing from negative, for instance)?You can adjust campaign assumptions to minimize the impact that PC ability has on NPC actions - making PCs rare and NPCs generally ignorant of their abilities - and you have, which is fine, but it's just one way of partially dealing with the issue.   A mechanical solution might be preferable to others.</blockquote>

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