But when in-combat healing becomes a neccessary part of any strategy, when it becomes something that it is assumed every party will have access to, and when combat is balanced to expect a certain amount of healing, you need to make healing sexy OR make it so easy with minimal cost that it really isn’t tactical healing. And, when you do that, every group of players feels like they HAVE TO bring a healer.

4E got close, as I said, but in the end, it still carries this feeling that a party needs to bring a leader and that the leader’s primary contribution is going to be healing.

I wonder if making healing as effective as extra striking is enough. The reason 4E made healing so easy is because for the majority of people, healing is not sexy, it’s a burden. Players didn’t want to be the one who sat in the back so other players got to do all the killing. The dragon slayer is the one who rides off with the princess. The guy who reattaches the dragon slayer’s arm might get a nice spot as an advisor somewhere, but that’s as high as they can hope to rise in current fantasy literature. So they made healing easy so players could be healers and still kick butt. Because if healing and kicking butt are equally effective, players are going to choose kicking butt.

So do we make healing more effective so it’s a better option and encourage its use? Do we leave it that way and make healers rare because they’re not as “fun” to play? Or is there another solution out there somewhere?

I think this is a great article that really hits the nail on the head when it comes to the problems with healing. The truth; as you point out, is that there are two problems and we are looking for a single solution.

As I was reading I had this thought I wanted to share with you about a possible 2 part solution.

For tactical healing have it be resource based similar to AD&D where a cleric has to choose to sacrifice to use it, and have the result be random and modified just like a sword attack would be. i.e. Cure Light Wounds heals 1d8+cha.

Outside of combat allow for healing rituals. Several rituals could be created for several levels. Rituals can be cast by more than just the cleric if in scroll form, take a long time so cannot be used in combat without having to say “hey you cant use this in combat”. In fact, if things are really dire creative players could find a way to use a healing ritual in combat if they wanted. (I see them barricaded in a room with the fighter holding the door while the cleric casts a ritual to bring the ranger and wizard back to consciousness.

What I really want to see go away are healing surges.

If you can approach a problem in multiple ways, some people seem to feel that it is, in some way, cheating; which is just not true. For example, in combat, you you can fire a gun relying on Dexterity, or swing a sword using Strenght. This is no more cheating than deciding if you will lie in a situation or try to say a convincing truth.

What could help here is if social checks had various factors to consider. For example, in battle you may choose a different strategy depending on whether the opponent is armored, has a good chance to evade, or is resistant to spells. If you do not want players to always use their highest social skill you should make a difference between how effective they are against different opponents: lying may not be as effective against an intelligent opponent who can see through it, while a convincing argument would require that the opponent is himself intelligent and not someone dead set on his goals, coercion may only work on the opposite gender; and so on.
If the system does not do so well at this, it’s your duty as the GM to apply hacks or house rules that can fix it.

My biggest concern with healing is 1. It doesn’t create batman style characters, with utility belts of resources slung around there waist. Barbarian temp HP and self healing I’m looking at you. As long as a party is still interdependent on each others skills and abilities I am all for tactical healing duties being shared beyond your standard cleric. 2. In a modular dnd next I want to be able to control the rate of recovery healing for the party. I don’t wanted it dictated but be able to adjust it based on narrative. To do this today I have to add in house rules and spend time explaining/justifying those rules to the players. Much better to set an expectation from the start and have it built into the math.
Cheers!

Let me throw out a few examples of what I mean.

First, you point out that, given your numbers, +4 AC would be worth 2 HP or 2.5 HP of healing. That’s all well and good. But its hard to give someone half a hit point or roll half a hit point on a die roll. But I would point out that a healing spell that heals 1d4 points nicely skirts your results. 50% of the time, people are going to be within one hit point of your results. Now, if you had chosen higher numbers and I could reasonably work with multiple dice (say 2d4), we could start talking about deviation from the mean result rather than talking about 25% precision.

Second, what you have really pointed out is that +4 to AC does not always have the same value. Specifically, it is more valuable when a character is being targeted by multiple opponents rather than one. And this is true of many things in an RPG. A bonus to attack is more valuable to someone who can make multiple attacks in a given round than someone who can only make one. A bonus to damage is more valuable to someone who is more likely to hit. And so on. And, of course, smart players recognize these things and take them into account when choosing their tactics.

So, certain assumptions need to be made about the normal sorts of situations PCs will find themselves in (such as the expected encounter size, assumptions about player behavior, and so forth). The farther you deviate from these assumptions, of course, the less precise the balance is going to be. And an acceptable level of precision needs to be chosen (or at least assumed).

And, of course, there comes a certain point where designers will also have to eyeball things and make some arbitrary calls (that are, hopefully, if the designers are good at what they do, pretty close to realistic) about the value of things. So, we can say 1d4 healing is close enough to +4 AC, or decide that because +4 AC becomes more valuable when surrounded by multiple attackers, 1d4 healing becomes less valuable when surrounded by multiple attackers, we’ll increase the amount of healing or decrease the AC by some amount. Then we’ll playtest the damn thing a few times and see how well it feels. And then we’ll tweak it accordingly.

If you expect 100% precision from any sort of game balance or believe you can do it purely by the numbers, I have to call your expectations unreasonable. But you can get in the ballpark and then rely on playtesting, tweaking, and designers being good at their job to get something that plays reasonably well.

But I feel all of this is ancillary to my point anyway. There are two different forms of healing and they have different purposes within the game. These two purposes needed to be treated differently and often end up at cross purposes. I believe that a balanced solution is entirely possible to given a reasonable expectation of balance.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t actually work in anything remotely resembling actual practice. It doesn’t even work within the very narrow limitations of My Precious Encounter design as implemented in game like 4E or (even more narrowly) D&D Gamma World.

To drastically simplify, let’s take a simple system in which you can build an encounter of a given level using either a single monster (X) or two monsters (Y and Y). In this drastic simplification we only care about the average damage done by the monsters per round, with the expectation that the damage between the two encounters should be the same (since they’re the same level).

Ignoring all magical buffing, let’s consider each encounter:

Encounter 1 – Monster X: Monster has a +10 to hit and does 10 points of damage on an average hit. A PC of this level is expected to have AC 21. Monster has a 50% chance of hitting, so his average damage per round is 5 hp.

Encounter 2 – Monsters Y and Y: They’re a lower level, so let’s say they have a +8 to hit. The target AC is still 21, so they have a 40% chance of hitting. There’s two of them, so they should each only be doing 2.5 hp per round (for a total of 5 hp per round). So they should each do 6.25 damage on an average hit.

Now, let’s add magical buffing. We want to figure out how much healing is equivalent to a +4 AC boost for these PCs.

For Encounter 1, the +4 AC boost means the monster drops to a 30% chance to hit. Which means his average damage per round has dropped to 3 hp. Ergo, +2 hp of healing per round would be equivalent to a +4 AC boost.

For Encounter 2, the +4 AC boost means the monsters drop to a 20% chance to hit. Which means that their average damage per round drops to 1.25 x 2 = 2.5 hp. Ergo, +2.5 hp of healing per round would be equivalent to a +4 AC boost.

Which means that 2.5 hp = 2 hp.

Whoops. That’s a 25% margin of error.

The numbers here, of course, are arbitrary. But they demonstrate the general principle: The rules for what would be an “acceptable” encounter (in order to maintain the balance you’re looking for) would have to be incredibly rigid and very, very narrow. (And that’s just to accommodate this one metric when, as you note, there are actually several metrics you need to simultaneously balance.)

@Deacon7: “I have long considered it an issue in D&D that the most accurate timepieces are characters who cast a spell 24 hours ago <we used to call it the "cleric clock" or got 7 hours and 59 minutes of sleep."

Eh. That would be like OD&D characters noticing that it always takes EXACTLY 10 minutes to search a given length of corridor. Or noticing that wandering monsters always show up EXACTLY on 10 minute intervals (always 20 minutes or 40 minutes after the last encounter; never 19 minutes or 42 minutes). Or 3E/4E characters noticing that they always have to move EXACTLY 5 feet; they can never move just 3 feet or maybe 6 feet.

In other words, you're treating the abstract mechanics of the game as if they were accurately reporting precise measurements from the game world. Once you start doing that, you're going to end up with absurdities everywhere you look.

The controllers, with their secondary striker nature, were one of the better groups!

I have also played in a longer-term campaign which had a group made up of four strikers (and when they died, we rotated in more strikers). This was again just to see how well the ‘play anything’ idea worked. For the strikers, we noticed two things: combat was a whole lot faster, and if we hadn’t won it in the first couple of rounds, we were most likely going to lose it. It was still playable, but certainly needed a different mind-set!

My point in my ramblings? The tactical choice of healing in 4e is quite workable and balanced, in my experience. Sure, those parties with leaders have the advantage of stronger healing, but with extra strikers, the monsters go down quicker; with extra controllers, monsters can be set aside until later (often keeping the party healthier); and with extra defenders, the monsters are focused on the harder defences, and become less effective.

Ultimately, from a player and a DM perspective, I much preferred the tactical healing of 4e (compared to 3e and 2e).

Now, as to out of combat healing? Yeah, I would like to see less instant-refreshing…but not to the level of “the paladin needed weeks of rest after the stirges”, as Dave Chalker mentioned. That sounds like the whole 5-minute workday again (just with two weeks of fast-forwarding at the end of it). Have an encounter, then everyone rests up until the players are all available again…

-hvg3