The Gaming Den

So we all know why D&D healing is shit:

1. The combat actions required to heal someone of N damage are exceeded by the combat actions required by the enemies of your level to inflict N damage.

2. Even if they required the same number of actions, healing would still be worse, because healing can't ever pull ahead of damage, by definition. Meanwhile, if damage pulls sufficiently ahead at any given instant it wins - while healing can only at best get to a zero state.

3. Healing is playing a sucker's game of reactivity. Your actions as a healer are determined by your opponent's actions, which means that a clever strategist can herd you into particular manuvers that ultimately make you lose at life.

4. Healing has a limited number of charges on it, but you can swing a sword or shoot eyebeams all day. Thus, even if the healer is seemingly staying even, he's actually falling behind.

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Right. We know that shit. The question remains: what do we do about it? Here are some obvious solutions:

1. Fire and Forget healing. In this case, healing works like Regenerate Wounds, only not ass. Or like those stupid Diablo II Healing Vines. Only again, not ass. The idea is that you would put up your healing and then spend the rest of your actions doing other things.

2. No combat healing. In this case, you don't let people heal during combat at all. Therefore, any healing you get or don't is all part of the whole between-combats dynamics and doesn't even fall under the auspices of character balance at all.

3. Fantastic healing. Like 3e Mass Heal type awesome. Idea being that healing actions would be every bit as combat turning as a Glitterdust or Evard's Black Tentacles, so using a combat action to do it would be a viable choice for a battle-field control mage to make.

So... what dost the peoples think? Wha would you rather see Healing do?

-Username17

Even though I feel summoner-based spellcasters are not quite "all that" in 3.5, I like the idea of improving spellcasters summoners to the point where they can quickly and efficiently spit out a bunch of creatures in a given combat ... or out of combat.

And the average summoning spell cast would grant you a creature that could do 1 of 3 things real well:

Combat Juggernauts

Utility Toolkits

Healers/Fix-er-uppers

***

And in some cases, you could summon creatures that could do a little of 2 or 3 of these things.

Currently, I like how say, a Druid can spontaneously spend a 5th level spell to summon 1d3 Unicorns to patch up the party. In this case, the unicorns could be cast in combat to help expedite the victory over the enemy, then while the duration is still running, do the cure thing to all those hurt. Multiple uses from 1 spell. Me like that.

I like 2. I think healing should be a complex magical task that requires some tranquility to pull off. But that's a flavor issue. If you want to keep in-game healing without tweaking too much shit, I'd say go with 3. Just un-nerf the healing spells until they work like they should.

I like Wren's Summoned Healers idea. It's sort of a version of option A, but more flexible.

No combat healing would be my choice, or better sucky combat healing as it is now. That way you can still save the stupid barbarian from having to roll up a new character after everybody else ran away.

But there needs to be a better mechanic for out of combat healing than screaming for the cleric, or buying tons of CLW wands.

Sma

I'm partial to the idea of combat healing. The tending of wounds after a hard battle is a staple of fantasy literature of all stripes, but I also like the idea of a healer casting a spell to make the warrior get back up and go one more round against the bad guys.

My solution would be to go with three, but go one step further. Healing spells would also enhance the subject in some way. Maybe all healing spells would be able to give you temporary hit points if they exceed your normal maximum. Or healing spells would be available as part of a package of things you could cast in one action, like Heal + Bless + Something. If we made packages, a healer wouldn't just be playing damage control, he'd also be doing something to prevent future damage to the party front liner or helping him deal out more damage.

One thing I consider worth looking at is this - Does healing have to be random like damage or would it also be acceptable to have all healing spells do static amounts of healing per casting?

Mass Heal awesome. With buffs, I like that idea - but not Bless, that's not even worth casting as it is.

That'd let healers turn the tide of battle, and at least be doing something positive w/ a heal instead of just playing a zero-sum game.

Well, first I have a problem with some of your concepts.

FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1105494157[/unixtime]]
2. Even if they required the same number of actions, healing would still be worse, because healing can't ever pull ahead of damage, by definition. Meanwhile, if damage pulls sufficiently ahead at any given instant it wins - while healing can only at best get to a zero state.

If you could heal all or more of the damage done to your group in a round, you're pulling ahead, so long as they arent' healing the damage your other characters are doing. If your side takes 50 damage, and heals 25, and you deal 40, and the monsters heal none, you're still up in terms of damage. Also, you'll be able to keep up as many people on your side as possible, by healing the most wounded character. This keeps your damage output constant while the monsters lose damage output to attrition.

Healing really doesn't have to get you to a zero state.

3. Healing is playing a sucker's game of reactivity. Your actions as a healer are determined by your opponent's actions, which means that a clever strategist can herd you into particular manuvers that ultimately make you lose at life.

Well not really. If the guy who can heal can do little to the monster anyway, he is strategically better to keep alive the guy who is doing more damage.

4. Healing has a limited number of charges on it, but you can swing a sword or shoot eyebeams all day. Thus, even if the healer is seemingly staying even, he's actually falling behind.

Again, not in the group sense of things. The situation isn't one healer versus 1 monster. It's 3 fighters and one healer versus 4 monsters. So keeping your group alive is actually pretty useful.

Also from a game standpoint, you'll have more fights to deal with later in the day, and assuming it's cheaper to heal than it is to resurrect someone, you're better off not letting them die.

Really, the question of combat healing actually comes down to the following questions about what we want healing to do specifically.

When should it be useful to heal?

Do we want classes where all they do is heal, and that's the most tactical move every round. Or do we want healing to be useful only when the healer himself can do little offensively?

What counters healing tactically? Do you beat healing by sniping the healer? Just focusing all offense on one target at a time, or what?

Right now, of the solutions 2 and 3 seem like the most viable. 3 really means you just have to upgrade the cure X wounds series, because heal and mass heal are already fantastic and useful enough. 2 pretty much means you do nothing.

Option 1 isn't really viable in our current combat system. The effectiveness of type 1 depends on the length of combats. If combats are over in 2-3 rounds (which they are with min/maxed characters), then you can't have an adequate healing vine. You've got to be spending a while hacking at things so the healing vine can actually do something and accumulate healing. If you heal 10 points / round for instance, if the combat goes 3 rounds, that's 30 hp, if it goes 8 rounds, that's 80 hp. Thus before we could really implement option 1, we'd have to significantly slow down combat.

We may have to do that anyway to implement good combat healing however, I'm not sure.

Really it matters what we want to do with combat healing. If we go final fantasy style where combat healing is just something everyone does and you're expected to do it to improve your party, then that's the less tactical approach. Or we could try to fit the healer into a definitive role tactically.

Personally, since I like the wargame approach, I'd prefer to give the healer some kind of tactical significance, though I'm not sure what.

RC wrote:If you could heal all or more of the damage done to your group in a round, you're pulling ahead, so long as they arent' healing the damage your other characters are doing.

No. You start at no damage. They do some amount of damage to your side. You heal, and remove some amount of damage from your side. Repeat.

Example 1: They do some damage. You heal more damage. End result: nothing happens.

Example 2: They do some damage. You heal that much damage. End result: nothing happens.

Example 3: They do some damage. You heal less damage. End Result: they pull ahead.

Example 4: They do some damage, killing one of your party members. You heal some amount of damage. Maybe even more damage, whatever. End result: one of your party members is still dead and the enemy has pulled wildly ahead.

So what do we learn from this? We learn that even if you are numerically healing more damage than the enemy is inflicting, the enemy is still pulling ahead. Eventually the opponent is going to rend or critical or something, and someone is going to die. And when that happens, you're out one of your party members - even if your healing is bigger than their damage dealt on the super turn.

-Username17

A stupid idea out of no place at all...

But what about in combat healing as (possibly brief in duration) an immunity/resistance to a particular form of attack, ie normal damage.

The cleric whacks a healing on the fighter and for the next X rounds/minutes/hours/days the bad guys basically need to use something other than whacking him with spikey clubs to take him down.

Not to say its a good idea, but its another vague option.

-ghost who talks, (having problems with his account)

FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1105576954[/unixtime]]
No. You start at no damage. They do some amount of damage to your side. You heal, and remove some amount of damage from your side. Repeat.

Example 1: They do some damage. You heal more damage. End result: nothing happens.

Example 2: They do some damage. You heal that much damage. End result: nothing happens.

Example 3: They do some damage. You heal less damage. End Result: they pull ahead.

Example 4: They do some damage, killing one of your party members. You heal some amount of damage. Maybe even more damage, whatever. End result: one of your party members is still dead and the enemy has pulled wildly ahead.

So what do we learn from this? We learn that even if you are numerically healing more damage than the enemy is inflicting, the enemy is still pulling ahead. Eventually the opponent is going to rend or critical or something, and someone is going to die. And when that happens, you're out one of your party members - even if your healing is bigger than their damage dealt on the super turn.

-Username17

This assumes your party is doing no damage, which is pretty crazy. Whilee the cleric or whoever is healing, someone else in your group is hacking. And the monsters doing damage to you doens't remove the damage from that hacking. So it isn't some guy standing around getting beat up and then healing the damage. Both sides are getting beat up, only one side is removing the damage, the other isn't.

What's important is that your damage dealt > their damage dealt - amount healed.

In fact it could be a bit worse and you could still be pulling ahead because you can decide who gets healed, thus your wounds may be more spread around than theirs.

RandomCasualty at [unixtime wrote:1105580525[/unixtime]]
What's important is that your damage dealt > their damage dealt - amount healed.

That's not quite accurate either. You could be doing less damage and still be winning the fight, as long as it will take less rounds to kill them than it will to kill you. When fighting a pair of Rogues, for example, you could be doing less damage per round and still be winning, since you can take more punishment than they can, and will drop them before they drop you.

Another possiblity is Frank's Power Cure thing from his FF D20 project.

FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1105576954[/unixtime]]
Example 1: They do some damage. You heal more damage. End result: nothing happens.

Example 2: They do some damage. You heal that much damage. End result: nothing happens.

Both of these scenarios assume that the use limits are the same (or worse for healing) on healing and damage dealing.

When they're not or when one side has temporary immunity to some of the other sides attacks, comabt healing becomes a viable strategy in the current game. Combat healing does not have to equal out to "attack" to be a viable choice *some* of the time, it just has to equal out to "aid another" or "flee in panic" in order to be worth selecting in certain instances.

Now personally, I have one major issue with making healing as good as "attack". And that issue is that frequent, easy and effective healing drastically increases the amount of realtime dedicated to running single combats. I could almost do without any combat healing, but that changes a lot of current status ailment conditions from tactical options into save-or-dies in a way I don't like.

That's a good point. IMO, though, healing doesn't contribute to leangthy combat nearly as much as:

1. Multiple attacks/round
2. Status effects (that almost always seem to knock out hte damage dealers), and
3. Spells and abilities that no one really knows about and make you hunt through several volumes of Complete whatever to figure out it gives you a +2 save against Scary Noises.

Certainly a problem of D&Ds non-standardized mechanics is that a status effect that gives you some penalties is quite likely to affect the Fighter's ability to swing a sword, but is quite unlikely to affect the Wizard's ability to have other people make saving throws against his spells.

When a Wizard casts Wail of the Banshee, he not only bypasses any and all healing possessed by the other side - he also doesn't actually roll any dice. So there are very few things short of taking the Wizard all the way out of combat that will do anything at all to his ability to attack enemies.

-Username17

I like 1 and 3. Regenerating damage every round is nice to have when fighting wimps, but nothing boosts morale like the whole party shooting back to full hp.

After reflection, (largely upon Spenser's St George and the Dragon) I am left wondering:

Which source material supports combat healing?

Assuming my memory isn't faulty, it seems that combat healing only shows up in anime, comics and videogames but does not show up much (if at all) in older fantasy literature.

This perhaps indicates that inclusion of effective combat healing could be important for determining game style.

I´d rather say have it be different levels of playing. Low Levels would be no to minimal amounts of healing. While at the higher ones you could pull out the Heal type stuff.

Which will further delay combat, but when you´re playing a 10+ game there´s already so many arbitrary effects going on at once that having people jump up from the brink of death will not change anything at all.

Josh wrote:Which source material supports combat healing?

The Lernean Hydra grows extra heads if it is wounded and the wounds not burnt.

The Green Knight's wounds close before the very eyes of his enemies.

The wolfman stands to fight again if he was slain with ought but silver or poison.

There is a budhist warrior tradition which sees healing as the comabtting of illness, and therefore sends the sick into battle in order to drive off infections.

* There is combat healing in suff like Final Fantasy and Lodoss Wars, which let's face it are derived from peoples' D&D campaigns anyway.

In stuff like The Court Jester, people cast spells that make the guy who's losing a sword fight start winning the sword fight and vice versa. This has no effect at all upon injuries, but might be considered healing if you had a separate combat morale damage or something.

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So as far as I can tell, all combat healing is either an elaborate excuse to get the frail and old to die on the front lines of major wars so you don't have to deall with them, or is the Regeneration power possessed by puzzle monsters.

I can find no pre-Gygaxian source material to support healing as a combat action.

status effects are added and removed in battle constantly. The big bad will raise his hands and block out the sun with clouds causing panic in the forces of good, and then the good hero will blow his horn an everyone will feel better. The evil wizard will gesture with his staff and turn all the heroes into mice, but the unlikely hero will cut his staff in half and everyone will turn back. But actual injuries are just there to stay as far as an individual combat is concerned.

-Username17

There's lots of stuff that "might" be combat healing in our folklore, it's just hard to tell b/c stories aren't nicely broken down into "combat actions" and "stuff that happens in story-time". Frexample - Aragorn stops the poison/disease/expanding evil in little Frodo. It's quick, happens right away. Seems like a combat action, but it's certainly longer than 6 seconds.

Or the sheath of excaliber, that either made wounds heal, or made it so that no weapon could harm you based on the source. That could be a combat action, or just something that happened for free. Or something else. Hard to tell.

FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1105723955[/unixtime]]
I can find no pre-Gygaxian source material to support healing as a combat action.

Aha! Luke 22: 50-51 !!

Bummer, otherwise there did seem to be a pretty clear line there.

But they are not in combat when Jesus heals Malchus' ear. They are sitting around talking, because there are a bunch of soldiers standing there and noone is being stabbed. The stabbing already happened and then Jesus starts mouthing off again and heals the ear.

It's not a counter-example, because noone is attacking Jesus, Malchus, or anyone else at the time.

-Username17

Due to the quirky nature of "healing" in D&D, it's hard to say for sure that there aren't any examples. Since hit point damage is very often not physical damage at all, "healing" actions need not be actual healing at all -- if some of your hit points derive from "inner power" or "divine favor" or even "the ability to turn a serious blow into a less serious one" -- hell, just about anything could be considered healing. While having a priest who chants prayers to God in the middle of combat could just be that priest casting Bless -- I'm not sure there's any reason why it also couldn't be the priest casting Cure Light Wounds on himself.

Which means that something as wacky as Elric screaming "Blood and souls for my lord Arioch" every damned time he gets into a fight could be interpreted as Elric healing himself. Bizarre, but true.

--d.

How do you change healing without making the druid and the cleric even more uber powerful?

I agree that healing is a reactive loser's game, but so what? If your divine spellcaster can't find anything more effective to do in combat than heal the fighter he is not being played very well.

A very partial list of better things you can do than heal the fighter include:

Increasing the AC and Saves of the party
Summoning monsters to absorb attacks, and grant flanking bonuses
Killing foes outright
Reducing the AC and Saves of the enemy
Putting up a wall/barrier spell

you get the idea.

Anything that finishes the combat quickly is better than healing. Sure a healer can't turn the tide of a battle (usually), but so what? All the other shit that a divine caster can do potentially CAN turn the tide of a battle.

Why does healing have to do this too? So the player can be emotionally gratified that his character looked good in combat? What? You want MORE love for the cleric and druid? I don't think that's a good idea.

If you wanted to make combat healing more interesting, than make it cost more. Say, let a cleric spontaneously cast a maximized healing spell once per minute, but it costs him two spells of the appropriate level. I'm not saying I would allow this, it's just a suggestion.

Psifon wrote: How do you change healing without making the druid and the cleric even more uber powerful?

Shouldn't be much of a problem, I shouldn't think. The current game balance notion is that because combat healing is such a crap tactic, that the rest of the combat actions that a Cleric performs should be substantially superior to what anyone else can do to make up for it. Needless to say, in competent hands, the Cleric ends up ignoring his combat healing almost entirely and just sits around having actions which are defined as being better than everyone else's.

The druid is even more so. The authors apparently feel that the druid is additionally weighted down with having to prepare healing spells in the first place, and is thus to be rewarded with doing more damage than most of the listed gods in melee.

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If you cut to the chase and made combat healing either go away or not suck, that entire line of reasoning would be gone, and Clerics and Druids could go on with their lives with no extra uberness layered on top like delectable cherries.

In short, fixing healing is step one in making Clerics balanced. If you take away their "crappy" actions, people won't feel like they have to have "awesome" actions to make up for it - and then we won't have Cleric Archers who just have awesome actions all the time.

-Username17