Healing Surges : What we learned

[DragonChild]

So working on my own system, and I come to the idea and thoughts of healing surges. As such, I want to talk about 4e's healing surges for a bit.



-As a "damage" that you take outside of combat, these worked REALLY well. A trap that causes the party to lose healing surges just works and feels a whole lot better then a trap that deals HP damage or something, especially if you have easy HP healing (which you probably do).

-As a way to make a player they've been really beat up, and go on the defensive later on, they were great. Having the ranger, with very few surges get roughed up in an early encounter and need to play defensive later on worked well, and I don't see it happening without healing surges. With just limited healing pool shared between everyone, there's a sense of "he wasted the healer" or "now we all have to play defensive", rather than just one guy limping.

-Healing surges needed to not be different when used in and out of combat. If the cleric has "Heal surge value +5 when you spend a surge", that NEEDS to work in and out of combat.

-As soon as healing surges could be openly switched around, everything collapsed. The paladin didn't do it due to limited uses, but with the artificer able to take surges from other people to power his heals ahead of time, the entire concept of healing surges became useless.

[Ghostwheel]

-They work better if you assume that HP is overall morale of a character rather than actual health. This has a number of side benefits on top:

--PCs don't have to die. While dying just becomes a temporary status effect at higher levels (which is not a good thing IMO), at low levels death disrupts the story. By making HP into morale rather than actual health you can have reasons that people beat a retreat or fall down without the will to fight.

--This means that Bad Stuff can happen to PCs when they lose. This is a good thing, since it helps develop more of the story rather than chopping it up into tiny pieces like death does.

--Overall this supports a more objective-oriented combat system rather than the class "annihilate all opposition due to the fact that PCs won't necessarily die if they lose. If the objective is to defeat the dragon to rescue the princess, the Bad Stuff that happens is that the princess is taken to another castle, the dragon burninates the countryside, and so forth.

--The above allows for different objectives. Rather than "kill the dragon", you could have something like, "do not allow any enemies into this 5x5 section for longer than a round for five rounds" in a "king of the hill" type objective, or a capture the flag where you need to deliver something from one side of the field to another, or a "capture area" objective where you need to capture different areas sequentially, and so on.

Apart from the whole "realism" aspect (lulz), I think making HP = morale/will to fight is a good change overall.

[Psychic Robot]

--The above allows for different objectives. Rather than "kill the dragon", you could have something like, "do not allow any enemies into this 5x5 section for longer than a round for five rounds" in a "king of the hill" type objective, or a capture the flag where you need to deliver something from one side of the field to another, or a "capture area" objective where you need to capture different areas sequentially, and so on.

If I wanted to do that, I'd turn on my Xbox.

[JonSetanta]

Healing surges is an fatigue mechanic with a stupid name.

After reading articles on how 4e players were stoked about using surges for non-healing purposes as if it were a per-day resource for everything, I thought "Why still call it Healing Surge?"

[TheWorid]

Healing surges is an fatigue mechanic with a stupid name.

After reading articles on how 4e players were stoked about using surges for non-healing purposes as if it were a per-day resource for everything, I thought "Why still call it Healing Surge?"

I think there would have been far less resistance to the idea if they hadn't decided to give it a meaningless name like "Healing Surge" and instead defined them as Wounds or something while clarifying that HP was mostly morale. That has its own problems, but I don't think it would have caused the same uproar.

[Josh_Kablack]

Conversely, let's be clear about when and where healing surges DID NOT work, or did not work as we presume they were intended to.

-If there is any type of non-surge healing available which recovers faster than surges, then Surges become meaningless. In 4e, daily powers that subbed in for surges were okay, because you get both dailies and surges back per day. Encounter or at-wills that provided even tiny healing were massively abusable. Even encounter/at will abilities to gain the nonstackable Temp HP were potentially abusive in some cases. (battlerager)

-The 4e paradigm of PCs have moderate HP and a lot of surges while monsters just have crazytown piles of HP and no (or rarely one) healing surge can easily result in combats that play out like Final Fantasy boss fights - so long as you have enough Phoenix Downs and make sure to bring everyone who's KOed back up each round, you will eventually win. In such situations there is no real ebb and flow of combat and healing is used as an action tax to keep the PCs from going on the offensive. This can get stale real fast, especially in groups that have played a lot of CRPGs.

-If healing surges require class abilities to unlock, and nobody in the group has such a class ability, then they are kinda meaningless in combats. In a 4e group where nobody plays a healer or defender with surge unlocking powers, the limitation of each PC only being able to use one surge per combat is likely a bigger deal than the total number of surges available to any character.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Critical existence failure combined with healing surges sucks the tension out of most fights unless you have like only one or two left (which creates a different sort of problem, see below). Unless you like this paradigm--which isn't a bad one, there's an easy way to fix this--it might be a better idea to penalize people for more healing surges that they burn.

4E fucked up immensely when they gave people a huge pile of healing surges at the beginning of the day. Combined with other problems, this made PCs way too invincible at higher levels esp. if they wanted a short workday. Seriously, the highest number of healing surges a character should have is like 4 and that's only for a tough-as-nails super defender dude. In exchange for this, people should get them back faster, like at the end of an hour's worth of light activity.

In addition to the above problem of the 5-minute workday is people regularly having those workdays cut off. Now people don't mind occasionally having to abort missions because of tragedy, but when one player is consistently causing the workday to get cut short that sucks monkey fuck. Your solution to this is either to make everyone's healing surges the same or to make it easy to get back in there if someone runs out of health. Again, I recommend the one-hour rest thing.

4E also fucked up when they tied the number of healing surges a character gets by a stat. At higher levels especially, it causes parties with a con primary or secondary to be way more effective than those without. Not that anyone noticed, since no one played at high levels and 4E combat is easy enough without it, but it could've been a major problem for balance have a party where the average healing surge number is 8 while another's is like 12.

4E fucked up minorly by having some classes pass out more effective healing than others. This stupidly made clerics a 'must have' class and caused people to tell non-Battle Captain/Battlelord of Kord (love these creative names) warlords and runepriests to go fuck themselves. The amount of healing you get from a healing surge should be almost nearly the same, that way people don't feel like retards for using their second wind or having the warden let them spend an unaided healing surge.

A better idea would be to do what 4E started to do near the end of its non-Essentials run; hand out specific bonuses or tactical situations for healing surges. For example, runepriests handed out a damage bonus with their healing surges or artificers could use Resistive Formula. This allows there to be a 'healing' class without it being a fucking necessity nor making all healers feel the same.


Like most things in 4E, it was a sound idea but atrocious execution.

[Lokathor]

Earthdawn (hey, that game I love) splits it up several ways:

Explanation
``You have a Death Rating and a (slightly smaller) Unconsciousness Rating, which are both based on your Toughness stat. When your current damage taken goes over either of these things then that thing happens. Simple.
``Your discipline gets access to a Durability talent at 2nd circle that you can rank up to increase both values. different disciplines get better or worse durability ratings, from the lowly 4/3 of the magicians to the mighty 9/7 of the Warrior and Windmaster. Most "fighting" classes get 7/6. For reference, people start off with like 31/22 (toughness 10) up to 38/30 (toughness 15) or so as the base value. Stats are on a 3-18 / 3d6 scale, but the current version of the game is pointbuy. You could have toughness 18, or even 21 with the right race, but that's largely unlikely because it's expensive on your points.
``Your toughness also gives you a Wound Threshold, which is a value in the 9 to 12 range, and if you take more damage than that in a single blast/burst/stab/slice/etc then you take a Wound. There's also a chance of you getting knocked prone, but we're skipping that for now.
``Some magical effects just directly deal out wounds to the target. Some of these effects the player can even choose to activate on themselves to get a bonus of some kind in exchange.
``These Wounds can pile up for a long time. I think death from too many wounds is an optional rule because I can't find it in the core rulebook for either 1st or 3rd edition. What a wound does is two things:
`````Subtract your current wounds from all Recovery Results, so you heal less the more wounds you have.
`````Subtract all wounds except the first from all your Action Tests and Effect Tests (effectively type of every roll you could ever make).
``You get 2 or 3 Recovery Tests per day, depending on Toughness. You can get a few more if you've very high circle, but most people just have the 2 or 3. After a 10 minute rest you can (on your own) spend a Recovery Test to recover damage. Roll your Toughness step (~5-7) and heal that much damage. Magical powers that heal you let you spend a recovery test right now and give you a bonus to the test's result (usually in the 1-10 range). Once you've spent a single recovery test then you need to wait an hour before you can do it again, and even the magical recovery test boosters usually don't let you bypass that limit (except the Fireblood talent, which is like healing through Angry Hunk Magic).
``If you have 0 current damage then you can spend a recovery test to remove a wound (no roll).
``Most things that heal you use a recovery test to activate and then give you a bonus on that test. There's an item that will heal you even when you're out of recovery tests, but those cost real cash money to pay for so you can't just stock up on a million of them. Even if a crafter in your group is making them for the group, it's pretty expensive pretty quickly.

So what does this all mean in play?

• At low-circles and near the beginning of the game people get stabbed a lot for usually less than their wound threshold and they die by just piling up too much damage.
• As you advance, damage goes up, and unconscious/death go up, but wound threshold doesn't really go up.
• People take more hits that they can heal, but they take wounds on top of it that they often can't heal as easily (fewer healing effects remove wounds, mostly just items)
• Once you get up there, people are often effectively-disabled from wounds by the end of an adventuring day, and even though they might be able to be healed back up to full the next day, unless they throw down a lot of healing items (for the cash money) they'll have to spend many days trying to heal up fully from "that big battle", which is kinda what the realism folks always want. It also makes adventures take arbitrarily more days to complete, which means that higher level adventurers don't level up as fast, so you don't get as huge of a DnD-rockstar problem (but sure, it's still mostly there).

And I think it works out pretty well.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Any excuse to spam Earthdawn, hmm?

You're only making us indirectly hate the game, guy.

[Username17]

Talking about Earthdawn in reference to Healing Surges is reasonable, considering that the idea in 4th edition is pretty clearly inspired by the Earthdawn mechanic.

-Username17

[DragonChild]

I am more than eager to see how other games do it. I am trying to set up my own system, as may be obvious so far. I'm thinking of just making a "DC's various thoughts and ramblings" thread.

[Lokathor]

My point is (roughly) that while there are healing surges, and they sometimes power up your powers, they mostly just heal you in tiny amounts, and they don't particularly represent your daily fatigue, that's Wounds. Your ability to keep going is actually most affected by your desire to pay crazy amounts of money to keep downing healing potions like they're PCP.

And that's where 4e got it wrong in the transition really. Wealth by level doesn't interact properly with the earthdawn vision of how healing and adventuring work. In Earthdawn when you get crazy rich you can buy like 1 or 2 or maybe even 3 items that will help you out with your thing, and after that you just can't very usefully convert more money into more item power. There's generic items that you can buy that are okay, and then there's legendary items that you just have to find in treasure piles from an adventure (ADnD style), and you have limited item slots because binding an item to you so that you can use it takes EXP. So instead you spend all your money on lots of healing potions and a pet tiger and a wizard tower in the middle of the forest and all those things.

[shadzar]

Healing surges taught me that people will min-max no matter what the game is and i dont care for those games.

While earlier editions had a mechanic to say "REST DUMB ASS!", like spell memorization/etc...there really shouldnt need to be such a thing. UIt is player mentality form video games and instant heal that causes the problems.

Rather than having a mechanic in the game, there should be lessons taught to players to make them rest and let some time pass.

Take healing surges mixed with "ignoring the fidly bits" such as consumption of food and other mundane accounting that 4th tries to get away from as the norm like ignoring tracking ammo and such...and you really are playing a pen&paper video game.

there was so MUCH in earlier editions people has to stop for and rest for taking time to figure out what to do next, the DM time to work on something for them, as well just take a few minutes break...it jsut seems lost on the video game era players.

I am being serious here on the new age players and their gaming backgrounds, not trying to attack anyone...but the only time you rest in a video game is for the cut-scenes and programmed stuff to force it so.

Fatigue mechanic isnt needed as long as the players learn it isnt a video game. In the past people would just figure out to rest even if they wanted to go on and die, or they would go on and die. The group regrouped and refocused on the objective.

I dont like HP as morale or fatigue...morale should be the player decision playing the character...and fatigue is lost when you dont require taking breaks to eat/drink as 4th edition does.

Ah the old netbooks of things that filled in blanks for many how to offer interesting ways for these things rather than just "i eat some rations".

Another VERY strange thing about healing surges still is how other people can spend your vitality....huh?

I would say jsut add a stat and get it over with and throw the surges away. Have your fatigue counter and leave HP for straight damage. When either is low enough, you got to rest.

[Ferret]

Seriously, what did day to day tracking of rations every bring to the game?

It only matters if it's going to impair you, and while you COULD make the ranger roll ever day to hunt game to supplement the parties rations, and the druid can gather twigs and berries, what does that add in general?

The handwaving of day to day minutia was and is a great thing unless you're in a situation where the day to day minutia IS the extended test, like crossing a vast desert or being shipwrecked and having to survive with nothing.

Forcing me to wait while the ranger rolls out a hunt just makes it more likely I'm going to whip out my phone and play bejeweled or something until something interesting happens. There's only so much 'around the fire' chatter a table can cope with.

Edit: To clarify, it's the handwaving resultant from the 'video game' mentality I'm praising as progress.

[Shazbot79]

The idea of healing surges in and of themselves don't really bother me as much as they do other people...many fantasy novels that I've read explain healing magic as drawing from the injured party's own lifeforce to fuel the mending of wounds...which is what 4E is going for, I assume.

The idea of healing surges doesn't bother me...the implementation however, does stick in my craw a bit. Mostly because I believe that characters in the game should have lasting consequences of sustaining axe blows from battle to battle. That is to say, I don't think that characters should be forced to go into battle at only 1/2 hp....but I don't like the idea of a nights sleep healing everyone entirely.

I know, I know...in previous editions of D&D you just healed everyone up with wands of CLW, and in Final Fantasy or Diablo you just chug healing potions inbetween battles, to say nothing of raise dead spells...but I don't like those ideas either.

I do like the idea of limited resources in 4E like healing, daily powers and action points being tied to one mechanic though...too bad 4E didn't think of it first.

[Lago PARANOIA]

The idea of healing surges doesn't bother me...the implementation however, does stick in my craw a bit. Mostly because I believe that characters in the game should have lasting consequences of sustaining axe blows from battle to battle. That is to say, I don't think that characters should be forced to go into battle at only 1/2 hp....but I don't like the idea of a nights sleep healing everyone entirely.

Shazbot, while the two things you want aren't totally contradictory they may as well be.

What do you actually want out of this system? Like when a party is going into their 4th fight, what should they look like?


Myself, my ideal system would be that players took ablative damage from fights so that as far as health goes but they also got better superpowers the longer the day went on up towards a certain peak. That is, the bonuses and penalties balanced themselves out such that players don't feel stupid for ending a day early or pushing on forwards but the 4th encounter of the day felt different from the 1st--players are more glass cannons. So in other words, players started later fights with less hit points and defense but did more damage and could use their better powers more often.

I would also combine this with the fixes I recommended in my post--that way people wouldn't feel too penalized by a bad performance early in the day but during that particular fight they would feel the crunch of bad luck or tactics. 4E's system right now does the opposite at higher levels... people don't feel threatened by bad tactics or luck early in the day, but it starts to hurt them much later on.

[Shazbot79]

Shazbot, while the two things you want aren't totally contradictory they may as well be.

What do you actually want out of this system? Like when a party is going into their 4th fight, what should they look like?

If I knew that for certain what my ideal system would look like, I'd be a designer.

Ideally, the game wouldn't be balanced with a specific number of encounters per day...so PC's going into their 4th fight could be either on their last legs, or could still have a bit of fuel left in the tank, depending entirely on the challenge level of the previous encounters. Ideal from my perspective at least.

I'd be happy with the healing surge system in principle, if it wasn't trivialized by surge-less healing powers, characters swapping surges back and forth, and the whole thing resetting back to full after a good night's sleep. Get rid of the last two and have characters recharge about half of their surges each day, and I would be happy.

I'd be happy with the A/E/D system, if there was more leeway with the chronological division between them, like if encounter powers were instead "per scene" or daily powers were "per mission", for instance.

[For Valor]

If you make characters recover half their surges in a day, you encourage the characters resting for 2 days to recover all their healing surges and then using the surges like crazy, only to rest for another 2 days and gain all the surges again.

[shadzar]

^^^ that is the problem with people playing the numebrs, not the game.

The players must first accept he premise of the game, rather than view it as video games have portrayed gaming.

dont try to best the number, try to best the objective given by the DM.

player mentality is a large part of the problem. what one sits down to play versus what they thought they were playing.

Seriously, what did day to day tracking of rations every bring to the game?

It only matters if it's going to impair you, and while you COULD make the ranger roll ever day to hunt game to supplement the parties rations, and the druid can gather twigs and berries, what does that add in general?

The handwaving of day to day minutia was and is a great thing unless you're in a situation where the day to day minutia IS the extended test, like crossing a vast desert or being shipwrecked and having to survive with nothing.

Edit: To clarify, it's the handwaving resultant from the 'video game' mentality I'm praising as progress.

is it progress?

if the healing surges are needed as a way to tell people to sotp and rest again, then it has not fixed or progressed a thing, only moved the problem from one place to another.

the rations meant taking time...people are NOT machines. video games could handle the tracking of all this and you have it...you run out of ammo, you run out of food, you just dont have to do the bookkeeping you open a menu and see your inventory and it does the subtraction for you.

take Avatar where Cameron said "Natyri must have tits, even though the Na'vi are not a placental race." The purpose they serve is to look sexy for the viewer of the movie. what purpose does certain body parts have if eating isnt required int he game?

like giving tits to Natyri, eating in an RPG humanizes them to relate.

also it gives all players downtime during the game to take care of other things.

what does the druid and ranger add by finding food? well richness to the game where a comp[uter game can show in pictures, and a P&P shows with descriptions. the flora, fauna, and generally your surroundings. what new could you find while searching for food?

you never had to use the minutia in the past, but to create a forced game aspect based on removing that minutia and adding another, serves no purpose. healing surges were added as a way to slow the pace down at a certain point. same as tracking rations/etc...the minutia. they are so integral to the game now though that you cannot just ignore them, as you could with stopping to eat rations.

if you are wanting to remove the minutia from play, why add it back in another form?

Forcing me to wait while the ranger rolls out a hunt just makes it more likely I'm going to whip out my phone and play bejeweled or something until something interesting happens. There's only so much 'around the fire' chatter a table can cope with.

This is your problem, not the games. you should be focused on the game rather than being so easily distracted. why arent you working on something for your character to do? why arent you paying attention to the ranger and maybe learn a few tricks from their playing?

do you not understand the need for in-game downtime? the reason for healing surges to create that forced downtime is the same as the ranger going and doing his thing. the character ARE mortal. since people like yourself half want to play and would probably rather play a game on a phone, they have to put some mechanic in it to get you to take a minute and realize that and to do that minutia.

P&P isnt supposed to be a video game, and D&D never was meant for it no matter what Bill S thinks just to collect some revenue.

healing surges are yet another mechanic in a long line, to get people to stop playing "run the gauntlet of monsters" and take a minute to do something else. so people that dont automatically realize this will not just take a character run it until dead, and make a new one to take its place.

progress? i still call it side-stepping the issue, that a mechanic is needed because people dont know how to play and understand the game.

do you discard healing surges since they are a mechanic to slow down playing just so you can get on with fighting?

This is the heart of role-playing. The player adopts the role of a character and then guides that character through an adventure. The player makes decisions, interacts with other characters and players, and, essentially, "pretends" to be his character during the course of the game. That doesn't mean that the player must jump up and down, dash around, and act like his character. It means that whenever the character is called on to do something or make a decision, the player pretends that he is in that situation and chooses an appropriate course of action.

Copyright 1999 TSR Inc.

There is more than one player...you are not the only player. As you make your decisions, others also have the right to make theirs also...so whether you like it or not...the ranger can do something that causes you downtime, so rather than whipping out your little toy to play with, find something productive with the game to do. dont be a distractive player.

[For Valor]

If you're playing the game and not the numbers, fighters are just as fine as wizards.

so let's not get into that bullshit, all right? It's what gives us Paizils.

[shadzar]

If you're playing the game and not the numbers, fighters are just as fine as wizards.

so let's not get into that bullshit, all right? It's what gives us Paizils.

No clue what you taking Paxil has to do with D&D....


The point is to stop min-maxing. in the case of halving the regeneration rate of healing surges means they will still rest until they have them back, run out and continue...then it is the problem of playing the numbers. nothing you do will stop people wanting to play the numebrs from running out of consumable resource A, resupply, and then continue until running out again.

so lets cut the real bullshit, and have people learn to play the game, and not try to beat the number or the system.

play the game, not the numbers.

IIRC even having less healing surges can be a benefit than being full at times for 4th because of the things they do...at least it is for monsters, or maybe that was just the updated screw-up DDM rules...

again the players must learn to stop, in order for them to stop. otherwise the only avenue a DM has to get them to take some downtime is to force them into a near-TPK. because people dont want to sotp..they think if it isnt something fast-paced going on then the game isnt fun and pull out phones and start calling people or playing games on them...


it is the player mindset that is and HAS been the problem since the player bloat of 3rd edition..

look at the players and see for yourself. see how many people have said it. the style of play changed. was it a good change? maybe not if the problems have gotten worse for the mechanic to further be causing more problems.

tell me what a healing surge is if NOT a way to say, "HEY this isnt a computer game with save points everywhere, it is more like on that pre-dates Zelda with its innovation of a save point where you can continue playing and die, but go back and reload. it is a more like Centipede, where you play until you run out of time or something forces you to stop and that is it, because you have mortality in the game. there is no save and go back and try from a saved game if you screw up"

that is what all these mechanics have done since the beginning. remind the players that the characters are mortal. you can handwave spell memorization time for wizards to have the night pass without incident, but it is the passage of time in the game, even with instant overnight healing without surges; that the game requires to show that earlier mentioned minutia is important to remind the players they are playing as mortals.

if you recover half the amountof healing surges int he same time, and people want to rest twice as long, then it is the same thing, only it serves to leave them open to other things. unles of course the passage of time means nothing as they are in no immediate danger...but that isnt likely everywhere, and if it is..then that is one munchkined game.

healing surges are that thing saying your character is mortal and needs to rest once in a while.

[Kaelik]

For Valor. I can only assume you made the mistake of reading what shadazar said. Try to avoid that in the future. All it will ever do is making you want to gut him with a fishing hook.

[MfA]

HP is essentially the mana of the melee classes ... if HP shouldn't be fully recovered then why should spells?

[Josh_Kablack]

Myself, my ideal system would be that players took ablative damage from fights so that as far as health goes but they also got better superpowers the longer the day went on up towards a certain peak. That is, the bonuses and penalties balanced themselves out such that players don't feel stupid for ending a day early or pushing on forwards but the 4th encounter of the day felt different from the 1st--players are more glass cannons. So in other words, players started later fights with less hit points and defense but did more damage and could use their better powers more often.

That's an interesting design goal, but I'm not sure how achievable it would be in light of the different durability and offense tradeoffs inherent in most versions of D&D and similar systems.

Let's pretend for we have a hypothetical system with something like 4e roles, but that actually work as intended.
So, for the sake of argument we have the Sturdy and aggro-generating Defenders, we have the squishier but mobile and highly damaging Strikers, we have the Leaders who provide people various bonuses and we have the Controllers who throw down terrain alteration and penalties on the enemies. If this works anything like prior D&D editions,we'll have a scale of padded sumo to howitzer-with-eggshell that runs Defender, Leader, Striker, Controller.

And your ideal could run into problems when the whole party is an one of the other of those extremes. In your setting were defense degrades as offense improves a defense heavy/offense low party is going to take a long time (although perhaps not much in damage or resources) to get through the early encounters and if workday has any correlation to game session, they may never get to unlock their super-combo moves.

Conversely, as the workday goes on an offense heavy/defense low party is going to go from squishy and fragile with rocket launchers to even more squishy and fragile with bigger rocket launchers. The tactics for this group don't change as the workday progresses - they want to go first and avoid even being attacked and tactical players will run them as quick-draw gunslingers and/or as stealthy ninjas (or other ways to avoid even being selected as an attack target). This group starts out not wanting to get hit, and goes to really not wanting to get hit, if they succeed, they unlock supermove after supermove.

[shadzar]

HP is essentially the mana of the melee classes ... if HP shouldn't be fully recovered then why should spells?

what?

everyone has powers in 4th..where the healing surges come from. so power are recovered at the same rate for all, or am i missing an analogy?