Why all the healing?

[Li Shenron]

Because players like taking a lot of damage and win the battle at the last moment.

 

[Derren]

Hit points work fine. They are exiting and easy to use.

 

[Campbell]

My guess is that most healing powers will be once per encounter abilities, feeding into encounters being the standard unit of challenge. Additionally, I'd hazzard that abilities with a healing component will generally be of less offensive value than other abilities making choosing to use a healing ability a tactical choice.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

As others have said because it is more exciting as:
"I got hit for 40 damage. I'm at 2 hit points, one more hit and I go down. Someone heal me."
"Alright I heal you for 20."
"I smack the enemy for 30, he's bloodied. I get hit back for 25. I'm down and unconscious. I might bleed to death if someone doesn't get to me in time."
"I have a potion here. I'll run over and use it on you. You're back up, but just barely, you'll die for sure if you're hit again."
"Then let's hope it dies before its next turn. I attack, I do 30, and it dies. Whew!"

than:

"The enemy hits me for 8, not enough to get through my DR 10 armor."
"I miss the enemy."
"It misses me."
"Everyone else misses it except for one person hits doing 6 which just gets past its DR of 5. It took one point of damage out of its 10 hitpoints."

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Is it, really, though? If you want to still be able to hit all the time, you could do a DR type thing, but the "stand and swing" bit gets tired pretty quickly. And since the intent, it appears, of 4E is to make everyone has a super-awesome time in combat, the system could be designed in such a way that all those super awesome maneuvers result in something other than hit point damage.

For example, let's say that there's a relatively high Defense threshold you have to "hit" in order to do damage, but a relatively low "hit point" threshold you have to reach with that damage to take someone out. So, instead of going through hit point attrition with your power attacks and sneak attacks and fireballs, all those elements (and whatever lse they've added) start stacking up bonuses to be able to beat that Defense threshold. You still get to roll lots of dice, and the results matter and push you ever closer to victory, just as with hit points, but don't require that everyone be able to constantly heal. Same goals, different way of achieving them while also solving another "problem" inherent in D&D.

But what kind of bonuses do people get together? Feint + Flanked + Tripped and then what? Feint II, Double-Flank and Pinned?
And after each combat, the bonuses disappear? And what about negating these bonuses?
Don'tyou end up just another kind of hit points, that you designate as 100 % refreshing after each combat (instead of healing slowly or by magic)

 

[glass]

True. But 4e seems to have taken most (at least 80%) of the resource management in D&D from per day to per encounter. The timeframe for resource management is compressed. As such, healing needs to happen more often.

I wish they'd gone the whole hog and made hp per encounter too, but what they are doing is the second best solution AFAIAC. A lot of the suggestion in this thread would be disastrous, IMO.


glass.

 

[Reynard]

I wish they'd gone the whole hog and made hp per encounter too, but what they are doing is the second best solution AFAIAC. A lot of the suggestion in this thread would be disastrous, IMO.


glass.

I agree that given the other system changes, making HP a per encounter resource makes far more sense than jacking up the hit points, jacking up the damage output and then jacking up the healing capabilities. If you instead did some sort of WP/VP system where the VPs area per encounter resource, you could reserve healing for WP and make it actually healing and nearly eliminate the need for the heal-battery (or batteries, in 4E).

My example was just an example. The point, though, is that hit point/damage/healing inflation doesn't do anything to improve the game, yet it keeps happening in every edition. When the game went to 2E, most of the increases went to the monster side, having the net effect of making combats longer and deadlier to PCs. The 3E "fix" was to jack up the PC hit points and the PC damage output, which might have helped except they went and once again jacked up the monsters' hit points and damage capabilities. 4E seems to be doing the same thing. Just increasing the numbers has no benfits and lots of in-play drawbacks.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

I agree that given the other system changes, making HP a per encounter resource makes far more sense than jacking up the hit points, jacking up the damage output and then jacking up the healing capabilities. If you instead did some sort of WP/VP system where the VPs area per encounter resource, you could reserve healing for WP and make it actually healing and nearly eliminate the need for the heal-battery (or batteries, in 4E).

But then it eliminates the fun that most people have of being near death and the feeling of "just barely pulling it off". The most fun combats for me and my friends are when we think the enemies might kill us and we can see the numbers slowly coming off our character sheets and doing the math we know that we have a chance of losing in a round or two if things don't go well.

We live in fear of having to cast that Delay Death in order to save someone's life knowing that we only have 1 or 2 prepared and after that, someone really will die. But also we fear the fighter dropping since we can do the math in our heads and we realize that if he isn't attacking for a round or two the rest of us won't be able to kill the monster before he drops the rest of us. But we have ways to stop the fighter from dropping or to bring him back up when he does. We can use wands, potions, and spells.

I think it creates more tension when I have to use my actions up in order to keep the fighter from dropping this round than it does if the fighter was just about to take actual wounds if the battle lasts a round longer.

My example was just an example. The point, though, is that hit point/damage/healing inflation doesn't do anything to improve the game, yet it keeps happening in every edition. When the game went to 2E, most of the increases went to the monster side, having the net effect of making combats longer and deadlier to PCs. The 3E "fix" was to jack up the PC hit points and the PC damage output, which might have helped except they went and once again jacked up the monsters' hit points and damage capabilities. 4E seems to be doing the same thing. Just increasing the numbers has no benfits and lots of in-play drawbacks.

Sure it improves the game. In 1st and 2nd edition getting the levels higher than about 10 didn't matter since you stopped gaining any real hitpoints. Might as well dual class to wizard than keep going on in fighter.

Damage kept going up at the same rate, however. But your hitpoints didn't. So the game got harder and harder and harder as you went up levels. Plus, it seemed rather arbitrary when you stopped gaining hit dice. And it happened at different levels depending on what class you were.

So, they fixed that. You gained the same amount of hit points at all levels. Win for the game so as to balance out the level curve. Plus, it was easier for new people to understand since it was consistent. You knew you gained one hit dice worth of hit points at all levels.

However, in the process damage increased dramatically. Mostly because of stacking bonuses and the standardization of stat modifiers and removing the caps from the stats. If you could have a 50 strength and you got +20 to hit and damage and you could get 1.5x that amount with a two handed weapon(plus feats, magic, etc) then you could do WAY more than the max damage of around 20 damage in 2e.

Suddenly you may have had PCs with 200 hitpoints rather than the 80 of 2nd edition, but you had monsters who were doing 40 damage per hit with 3-4 attacks per round. This actually caused combats to become much quicker(in terms of number of rounds, not the actual time taken to play them). They are sometimes 1-2 round affairs due to the fact that damage scales up at the same rate or faster than hitpoints do. Instead of 8-10 round combats in 2nd edition, you have 1-2 round combats.

So in order to fix that problem, I see that 4e is carefully controlling damage and hitpoints in the game. I actually think you'll see damage for both PCs and monsters drop off from what it was in 3e. The designers said that 5-7 rounds seemed about right for a combat and that each PC should essentially be fighting one monster by itself. If you assume that is correct, it means that if PCs get 4 times normal hitpoints at first level and everything else stays the same then at 10th level the average fighter should have around 121 hitpoints. It should take the monsters around 6 rounds to take that to 0. So at 10th level the monsters should be hitting for around 20 per round.

Sure, the monsters are likely to hit for 30 in one hit, unlike 3e. However, they are unlikely to get more than one attack per round. You'll also note that even if all 5 monsters attack the one fighter, they don't drop him in a single round. They always leave him(on average) with 20 hitpoints left. Thus, giving the party one round to heal the fighter up to full and be ready for the next round of combat.

Then if you set the PCs damage to what would, on average, defeat the monster in about 5 rounds, you know that the PCs will almost always defeat the monsters 1 round before they get defeated themselves.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I agree that given the other system changes, making HP a per encounter resource makes far more sense than jacking up the hit points, jacking up the damage output and then jacking up the healing capabilities. If you instead did some sort of WP/VP system where the VPs area per encounter resource, you could reserve healing for WP and make it actually healing and nearly eliminate the need for the heal-battery (or batteries, in 4E).

My example was just an example. The point, though, is that hit point/damage/healing inflation doesn't do anything to improve the game, yet it keeps happening in every edition. When the game went to 2E, most of the increases went to the monster side, having the net effect of making combats longer and deadlier to PCs. The 3E "fix" was to jack up the PC hit points and the PC damage output, which might have helped except they went and once again jacked up the monsters' hit points and damage capabilities. 4E seems to be doing the same thing. Just increasing the numbers has no benfits and lots of in-play drawbacks.

I think they exist to add a further dynamic option to the game - you have to decide between healing damage and dealing it. THe hit points are a "nastiness buffer", but it will only serve you well if you're keeping them in shape by healing.
In some ways, healing adds yet another buffer - sure, the last critcal hit brought Timmy the Tank down to 3 hit points, but the Cleric will patch him up before the next volley of strikes hits them.

That aside, I think Wound Points aren't that bad as an idea, but they are also ripe for "abuse". The previous D20 Starwars Edition did have this problem - there was a way to bypass hit points to get directly to the wound points, and that's a bad idea, leading you right back to save or die effects. (Though it's not a bad idea if you like Save or Die )

 

[billd91]

One good defense of hit points is the way it makes encounters more scalable. If the defense is all up front, particularly if level dependent, lower level or characters with weaker offenses are stopped at the first threshold. For those of you who play Hero, think of a defender with 40-50 points each of resistant PD and ED or a ridiculously high combat value. You can probably make attacks at it all day and won't affect it (possibly without a supremely lucky shot). Attackers with even a little lower ability can't make any headway.

But if the initial threshold is lower, like AC that doesn't keep up with BAB in 3E, you can start chipping away at the defender with weaker attacks, lower-level henchmen, and so on. And for RPGs, I think this is, for the most part, a good thing. I'd rather find ways to chip at the opponent than hope for the extremely lucky shot.