What are your problems with Healing/Dying mechanics in 4E

[Dausuul]

My problems with 4E's healing and dying mechanics:

#1: The dying mechanic is difficult to reconcile with non-magical healing. My character is reduced to zero hit points and falls down, bleeding out, mere seconds away from death; well and good. But then the warlord yells at him and he snaps out of it and jumps back up, carries on adventuring as if nothing had happened, and is fine the next day? This is the place where the hit point abstraction breaks down IMO. Even with magical healing, you'd think there would be some effect from being on the brink of death.

#2: PCs are excessively blase about being reduced to zero hit points. I have seen healers deliberately hold their healing (heck, done it myself) until someone falls unconscious, because you get more bang for your healing buck if you use it on a target who's below zero hit points. Granted, there are drawbacks to going unconscious, but if the healer is at the right spot in the initiative order - or delays to get to that spot - those drawbacks are minimal.

#3: There's no such thing as long-term injury. I don't want PCs to have to deal with lasting injuries all the time, or even most of the time, but I do want it to come up once in a while.

#4: Some powers inflict hit point damage that really should not do so, e.g., the bard's Vicious Mockery power. If it does hit point damage, that means it can kill. Vicious Mockery should not be able to kill. (Yeah, yeah, I know, it's magic Vicious Mockery... a wizard did it.)

#5: Minions and auto-damage (damage that does not involve an attack roll) don't play well together. I'm a huge fan of the minion rules, but they need to be tweaked so you can't slaughter minions by the truckload using area-effect auto-damage.

#6: As mentioned above, coup de grace isn't.

My solution to #1, #2, and #3 would be to give PCs more hit points, but impose serious consequences for dropping to zero. Once you go to zero hit points, you should be out of the fight and possibly suffer a lasting injury. Healing effects can keep you from dying, but won't enable you to jump back up and rejoin the fray.

For #4, of course, make those powers not do damage, or just get rid of them.

Haven't yet worked out a solution to #5 that I'm happy with.

For #6, make it much harder to impose the unconscious or helpless conditions; balance those conditions as if they were instant death effects. Then make the coup de grace vastly more lethal. Something like: "The victim is reduced to zero hit points and must immediately make three death saves."

 

[Markn]

Do you mean through use of multiple powers? If a single power, how? I'm not even sure at all how you'd manage to get more than 3/4 of someone's health back in one power in 4e, and even that requires real effort or only applies for a level or so (when a 6th level warlord gets that 2 surge power, has a high charisma, has multiple items that add to healing surges)

Sorry, I can see how my statement could be confusing. It's through the use of multiple powers. Again most of my experience is with 2 leaders. So, I see a guy drop, learder 1 do a heal, leader 2 do a heal, etc so that it is effectively like a Heal spell from previous editions. As DM in the earlier editions, you expect that super healing once in a while, in 4e, I still shake my head as to how often you can go from 0 to full so often, so quick.

Fair enough. For clarity, do you mean as a PC against monsters, or monsters against PCs?

Both, but the majority of the times its the monster trying to kill the PC that way.

One other thing I just though of - tactically its to everyone advantage to always heal when someone reaches the bloodied value. It would be nice if different strategies warranted it different tactics. Currently, there is no real strategy involved other than figuring out this benchmark.

Food for thought for you - I've been thinking of doing some changes to healing myself. I've been thinking of setting healing surges to a per encounter thing (mentioned in my previous post), say 3 or 4 (the number depends on how gritty you want things). Make second winds a move action, and make them unlimited. Then in addition, remove things like helaing word/inspiring word and giving those classes an alternate ability to replace it. Instead, a leader would give a static bonus to your second wind. Effectively, this means the leader needs to never do any healing, but his presence is still felt by his bonus. Its up to each player to choose when he heals himself. Additionally, the clerics static bonus would give actual hps, while a warlord would give tmp hps via his static bonus further differentiating the leader classes. I haven't thought this fully through but thought you might want to play around with the idea.

 

[malraux]

One other thing I just though of - tactically its to everyone advantage to always heal when someone reaches the bloodied value. It would be nice if different strategies warranted it different tactics. Currently, there is no real strategy involved other than figuring out this benchmark.

I've played a dragonborn dragon magic sorcerer; for him, its always better not to heal until he's unconscious. When he's bloodied, all his defenses go up, as does his attack bonus. And because of the way dragonborn work, a single healing word will typically get him out of bloodied unless he's at zero. That said, it is a pretty limited example.

My personal dislike related to the 4e health system is that diseases aren't scary or lasting. The DCs are way too low; I've never seen a single character even fail a disease worsening check.

 

[Markn]

I've played a dragonborn dragon magic sorcerer; for him, its always better not to heal until he's unconscious. When he's bloodied, all his defenses go up, as does his attack bonus. And because of the way dragonborn work, a single healing word will typically get him out of bloodied unless he's at zero. That said, it is a pretty limited example.

My personal dislike related to the 4e health system is that diseases aren't scary or lasting. The DCs are way too low; I've never seen a single character even fail a disease worsening check.

Agreed on both counts.

 

[Herschel]

The one thing I may like to try is when a character is reduced to 0 HP or below and is unconscious, when they heal they still heal from zero, but they are Stunned (Save Ends) or maybe at least Dazed (Save Ends) to simulate the groggieness/discombobulation with sudden wakefulness and position/orientation change.

This would save on the 'wait until they drop to heal them' scenario at least.

 

[ppaladin123]

My problem is that it's too hard to die!

I've never had a PC die due to failing 3 death saves. At higher levels it's very tough to get to -ve bloodied, because of the rule that any healing when below 0 raises you to 0, then adds the healing.

I have to agree. Negative bloodied is very difficult to hit. My group has discussed using negative surge value instead. I also have the same trouble with the three death saves. We are thinking of making it three failed death saves per extended rest (as opposed to per short rest).

I've also thought of maybe applying some random damage (maybe xd6 depending on tier) upon every failed death save. That would make it possible for the player to die of damage while unconscious. It would also make every death save more dramatic. As it stands, my party members say things like, "I'll heal him next round, he's not going anywhere."

 

[TerraDave]

Its funny, once I talked to Mike Mearls, at the D&D experience where they previewed 4E, and he told me that the healing mechanics were his favorite addition to the then new game. And they did look at a lot of alternatives.

General problem: current mechanics work pretty well in practice (or at least I thought till reading the above) but feel gamist, both in their crunchiness and in how easy it is to heal.

In defense of the system, a few things are worth noting:

*healing surges (and death saves) are limits. You get a lot of surges (and maybe saves in a day), but at some point, the healing will stop. I now from past editions, healing really could feel unlimited.

*Being dropped does have consequences: you might be out of range of healing--hence risk loosing actions and failing death saves, you have to take an action to get up, the DM might be mean and have someone attack your prone charecter (especially if players are always holding back on the heal). (note: I actually do like the dazed rule noted above).

*magic does boost healing: warlords heal, clerics heal better. Its good the system is less cleric dependent, but the magic is still there.

Improvements: introduce somekind of long term damage, at least once in a while, and have a better "story" around healing surges and healing.

 

[Jack99]

*Being dropped does have consequences: you might be out of range of healing--hence risk loosing actions and failing death saves, you have to take an action to get up, the DM might be mean and have someone attack your prone charecter (especially if players are always holding back on the heal). (note: I actually do like the dazed rule noted above).

The higher level the players are, the truer this seems to become. Especially with an increase in close and area attack from the monsters, it seemed like dying players often got hit by extra attacks. On the other hand, there is a frighteningly high amount of healing at higher level, but none the less. The healer can't always heal. Maybe he is out of range, maybe he has no line of sight, maybe he is stunned, maybe he has to prioritize.

 

[Vael]

My personal dislike related to the 4e health system is that diseases aren't scary or lasting. The DCs are way too low; I've never seen a single character even fail a disease worsening check.

Our druid succumbed to Chaos Phage, even with my bard using a ritual and Inspire Competence to add 7 to his Endurance check. Mind you, it was an above level disease.

 

[hailstop]

I've never even had my PC's bother with Endurance checks. It's been immediately...Cure Disease! And once you get past about 14th level or so, RAW it's practially impossible to have any substantive failure on the roll.