Why are healing surges limited?

[Mort_Q]

Hilarious. So the difference between 3e's "fifteen-minute adventuring day" and 4e's is whether you unwisely blew all your healing surges instead of whether you unwisely blew all your significant spells.

There are ways to heal without using healing surges. Presumably, those just get more costly.

There will always be limiting factors, else it would be unwise to not use your most powerful abilities.

Which in 4e means the whole party needs to keep track of resources, instead of just the casters having to hold back the combat types.

 

[hong]

This thread has caused me to consider keeping healing surges limited per day, but making per-day powers into at-will and requiring an action point to use.

 

[WhatGravitas]

This thread has caused me to consider keeping healing surges limited per day, but making per-day powers into at-will and requiring an action point to use.

Does it concern you that people will then disregard their lower-level dailies and use the same daily over and over again (except for their utility dailies - because these are more situational)?

Cheers, LT.

 

[Blackeagle]

This thread has caused me to consider keeping healing surges limited per day, but making per-day powers into at-will and requiring an action point to use.

Seems like that would lead to less use of daily powers at high levels, unless you give extra action points. A 20th level character has 4 daily powers. Matching this with action points would require seven encounters (one AP to start with, six encounters to gain 3 AP, plus one more encounter to actually give you a chance to use the AP gained after the 6th encounter). It also means that action points probably won't see much use for their traditional purpose (it seems like a daily ability will be better than an extra action most of the time).

 

[hong]

Does it concern you that people will then disregard their lower-level dailies and use the same daily over and over again (except for their utility dailies - because these are more situational)?

Cheers, LT.

Not really.

Also, I'd bump up the number of APs, and allow more than one to be spent per fight. Maybe give them out a la stunt dice in Exalted, or just 1 per fight as a rule of thumb.

 

[WhatGravitas]

Not really.

Also, I'd bump up the number of APs, and allow more than one to be spent per fight. Maybe give them out a la stunt dice in Exalted, or just 1 per fight as a rule of thumb.

Give out action points for getting bloodied for the first time in an encounter. That would solve one of your long-standing problems (i.e. PCs open battle with their big guns).

Cheers, LT.

 

[Lurker37]

Call me crazy, but I'm going to wait to see how the RAW work before I consider adding house rules.

 

[Hussar]

That's it in a nutshell, for me.

/snip

After thinking about it some more and hearing some of the arguments posted, I'm going to give the RAW another chance. I'm still not completely convinced that limited healing surges are such a great idea, but I also didn't tone down the encounters to account for the fact that there were 4 PCs instead of 5, and we're also not in the area where the meat of the adventure takes place.

And I think right there we have the winner. The reason the fights are more difficult is you've started with a handicap right off the bat. Plus, you're using pregens (presumably) that are already designed with the assumption of 5 PC's. So, of course you're going to be burning through resources considerably faster.

My suggestion would be to start yanking out a few baddies in the next few encounters to bring them into line with the original intentions of the module. I imagine that will cure a number of your issues.

That's using roleplaying to balance mechanics, which I think is a very poor idea.
I don't recall seeing that anywhere, not that it makes much of a difference.

Now this I do agree with. Using RP to balance mechanics is a piss poor design choice.

But, that's not what's happening here.

The 15 minute adventuring day (a short hand, somewhat fuzzy term in any case) was the result of clerical healing. Cleric runs out of curing spells, you had to stop. If you didn't, you died. Not, you were hurt. Not, you suffered some, just, you died. 3e combat was far and away too lethal to allow for entering combat without significant healing resources, particularly at higher levels.

Now, you can have the 15 minute adventuring day in 4e. Of course you can. But, unlike 3e, where if you didn't stop, you died, in 4e, you have the choice. And, by using encounters that are appropriate, the party shouldn't have to stop. No one in 3e stopped after using a couple of minor spells. They stopped after the cleric blew through his load for the day.

The reason Asmor's players are stopping is because the encounters are significantly more difficult than they should be. Not because the mechanics are screwed up.

 

[M.L. Martin]

Call me crazy, but I'm going to wait to see how the RAW work before I consider adding house rules.

At the very least, we should be sure to read carefully the page on House Rules in the DMG.

 

[FireLance]

This thread has caused me to consider keeping healing surges limited per day, but making per-day powers into at-will and requiring an action point to use.

There's at least one paragon path ability (Sword Marshal's Action) that allows you to recharge an encounter ability by spending an action point. If you allow the PCs to get dailies with their action points, you may want to consider changing that for something else.