Mar22
on March 22, 2018
Price of Healing
Someone needs to be the healer. And when no one else wants the role, the GM might have to take measures to ensure a balanced party!
Personally, I just let the players pick their classes and work around an absence of healing, taking longer rests. If I do need to step in, it’s usually to allow a few more healing potions or the occasional magic wand. Give them a little more resources so the plot isn’t interrupted and allow them to mitigate a critical hit.
I remember playing Dragonlance setting with 1st edition rules… without clerics it was truly hard. (Also, in a world with no clerics left, who makes the healing potions?)
I find that 5th edition fixed it, albeit in a totally unrealistical way (they gutted me to 1 HP? no problem! 8 hours of sleep and I’ll be as good as new!).
In 3.5 clerics, having lots of feats to increase healing and being able to spontaneously convert spells to healings, became funnier to be played (sometimes even a little OP). Heck, I’m an atheist, but I truly enjoyed playing dedicated clerics in Forgotten Realms!
I loved playing a bard in 3e and being the support character. But I wasn’t the dedicated healer per se.
Healing in 5e is funky. But fast healing came from feedback from the playtest surveys: it’s what the audience wanted. Hard to argue with that. Thankfully, it was designed to be house ruled.
For my homegame, I reduced overnight hp restoration. You only heal overnight if you rest for 24 hours in a comfortable location (an inn, your home, etc). If you rest in the wilds (a camp, a secure shelter you heal 1/2. And if you’re in an unsafe location (a dungeon) you heal 1/4.
This is why I usually stick with off-shoot rules that are more geared towards a Conan-like fantasy genre, like MGP’s Conan RPG (3e-based) and Crimson Blades 2 (OD&D-based).
In such settings, magic is rare and seldom useful or spectacular — just sinister and often deadly — with classes like Clerics and Paladins being seen as highly inappropriate for the genre. For the sake of keeping the action going, such games are WAY more forgiving with natural healing, to the point of where you can get some recovery by swigging a pint of ale (in a way where you kinda imagine the character crushing a beer can on the forehead afterwords).
Also, damage reduction for body armor help to negate a fair amount of damage, making healing spells and potions less critical, and level-progressive, dodge/parry-based AC scores makes characters less dependent on magical protection at higher levels.
Ironically, such jock-headed games greatly favor intrigue, suspense and pro-role-playing mechanics (think 5e’s “Inspiration” rule) over repetitive, mind-numbing hack-n-slash.