Why are healing surges limited?
- Thread starter Asmor
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Blackeagle
First Post
FadedC said:
Negative Con modifier, maybe?
Blackeagle said:
Yeah you'd pretty much need to be a low healing surge class foolish enough to take an 8 con, and then you'd need to use a second wind, and be healed twice by the cleric during the fight and then beaten back down to 0 hit points.
Even then you'd still be able to do another fight at 75-100% of your hp, you just wouldn't be able to be healed again.
A single encounter includes the after-encounter heal-ups, which can take up to 4 surges if you finished the fight at < 25% of your hp.FadedC said:
The pregen rogue & wizard from KotS have 7 surges per day. The ranger & wizard from DDXP have 6.
So it's not possible for a character to use 2 surges in a fight and still end up with single-digit hp at the end? Now, ideally strikers and controllers shouldn't be taking that kind of punishment, but stuff happens.
Lord Tirian said:
In my experience playing KotS so far, the fighter and paladin usually become bloodied 2 or 3 times per encounter. But if the AP was just bestowed the FIRST time, like you say, that might be ok.
Then I can see all sorts of applications stemming from that... Burn 1 AP for the additional standard action it normally allows... Burn 3 AP to use a Second Wind even if already used that encounter... Burn 5 AP to activate a Daily Power that was already used... Give it a lame name like Action Surge or the like...
That would get a fighter who got bloodied in every single encounter 5 AP by the start of the fourth encounter (1 to start + 3 bloodies + 1 milestone) assuming he didn't use any along the way. Which is just about the time for an extended rest anyway.
Could add a whole lot more variety and fun to the whole AP system. I think players would really enjoy that, and the number of AP required (which would reset to 1 at each extended rest) wouldn't make the system THAT easy to abuse. (Edit: By adjudicating that the AP expenditure can be used only once per encounter, as is the case anyway, and not awarding milestones for players destroying encounters of piddling difficulty just to accrue AP).
Anyway, I'm at the point where I'm content to see what the system actually works like before I start retooling anything.
Last edited:
Spatula said:
Even then if the cleric uses healing words he will probably have 1 or 2 surges left in the end.
You might somehow have 1 person who used up all their surges in a fight. But your party is still at full or close to full health and has most of their spells. They are way better off then they would be in 3e and the DM can throw more fights without a guaranteed TPK.
Asmor said:
Well, answer number one: If the PCs are genuinely drained after one encounter, then yes, they should rest. Running out of healing surges, or running low on them, is a good indication that you should rest.
But it should be very unlikely that the PCs will be in this situation after a single encounter! They have enough healing surges that they should be able to get through several encounters a day before feeling the crunch from healing. If they are regularly burning all their healing surges on the very first fight, then something is clearly wrong - either with the encounters they are facing or the characters themselves. I can see it happening every once in a while, if they end up in a really tough fight... but every day? That seems almost impossible.
Now, putting that aside, part of your argument is that it (Full Healing Surges) > (Not Full Healing Surges)... and thus, if there is no penalty for rest, a party will rest after every fight.
But consider - the same goes if they use a daily ability in the first fight, or their Action Point. Why not burn dailies right away and then rest afterwards? Logically speaking, it is always better to be completely at full than to be in any way weakened, right?
The problem is, the only way to remove that issue is to completely remove any daily abilities. Characters would have to be able to charge into every fight with absolutely the same resources available, and to entirely remove any sort of endurance mechanic from the game. Now, that could be a perfectly ok game... but would most definitely be a very, very different one. Is that what you are suggesting?
What 4E has done is severely cut back on how vital that resting is. In 3rd Edition, it was extremely easy to burn through all of your healing and powerful spells in one fight. In 4E, less so. Action points still recover every few fights, which is encouragement to keep moving. You get encounter abilities back every fight. Daily abilities are nice, but aren't so overwhelmingly beyond other abilities that they are your only available tool - in fact, your basic abilities (at will) are now solid enough to do the job when needed! And your Healing Surges should last you several fights before you feel any need to recover them.
Basically - if you are in a situation where, after every fight, your characters are feeling weak enough to need to rest, something is off. If you aren't, and you players simply really need that extra action point and daily ability... well, ok, fine. They can do so. I am confident such tables will be in the vast, vast minority - it is simply too little benefit for the boost, and most tables will be more interested in keeping things moving along.
(And, of course, there is the roleplaying elements that many have already mentioned - either plot constraints that place a sense of urgency, or simply in-character desire to keep fighting onwards, or the danger of resting in what might not be the safest spot. The counter-argument seems to be that we shouldn't consider these arguments now, since we tried to push them aside when discussing the same problems in 3rd Edition. The difference, in my opinion, is that many, many times in 3.x, it was essentially a *requirement* that you needed to rest after a fight, or you'd be walking into the next fight with several useless party members. In 4E, even if you burn your action point and all your dailies in fight number one, you will still be far from useless in the next. For most tables, that should make all the difference.)
Asmor
First Post
MrMyth said:
I think my original point got muddied a bit. Actually, I don't think it was very clear to begin with. I've got two seperate issues here, one of which is a subset of the other:
1: a theoretical question about the worth of limiting healing surges, the original intent of this post.
2: a mechanical question about making balancing extended and short rests so that it's not necessarily always best to take an extended rest when the opportunity presents itself, which I've foolishly let myself derail this post into.
Actually, that's not the only way to deal with it. I still think I had a good idea originally, about not starting them off with an action point but giving them action points for every fight after that. Thus they can keep going and further fights are made easier by the action points, or they can rest to regain their dailies. I guess, in essence, it means trading in an action point pre-emptively to restore your daily abilities (and healing surges, as the case may be).
Not saying it's perfect as is, but I think the concept has merit and it's just a matter of figuring out what sort of incentive to dangle in front of them which is just lucrative enough to make them want to keep going.
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