Majoru Oakheart
Adventurer
I find that it just become a test of bumping egos. Everyone can do whatever they want. No obligation to help anyone else or work together as a group. Everyone just runs off in their own direction and competes to see who does the MOST. Sometimes purposefully sabotaging the others to make themselves look good. If someone screws up, then you might as well dump them from the team and tell them to get lost. After all, everyone else in the group can already do what they do. If you have only 4 members instead of 5...well, it's less numbers but I'm sure you'll make due.Because the bad guys can win by themselves too.
In comparison, if the Cleric's healing is the only thing that has kept you alive the last 3 fights, you are going to respect his opinion. If you would have died last battle if the fighter hadn't interjected himself between you and the enemy...then the Fighter becomes a valuable member of the team.
That's true. However, the tension in a fight is quite a bit different with in combat healing than without it. If the math is balanced to make sure no one dies in an average combat against average enemies without any healing at all, you end up in a situation where most battle feel like they weren't a challenge at all. If you all have 50 hitpoints and every battle you fight, no one goes below 10(since there is some wiggle room in the math for slightly harder encounters)...then, it all seems so...mundane.And more importantly, you do not need healing in the middle of a fight. That is a pure metagame construct that exists only to support the artificial divide. If you tweak the numbers, you can abolish combat healing while leaving ritual healing to get people back in fighting shape.
If, on the other hand, when you fight a battle, you get knocked unconscious only to have your friend run over and heal your wounds followed by another person falling down and needing to be healed...well, it feels like you are fighting harder things. Even though the game assumed there was a healer and that's just a normal part of combat.
That's kind of the feeling that D&D goes for most of the time.