Alternative to Cure spells and Lay on Hands

[JonSetanta]

Heal
Conjuration (Healing)
Level: Clr 6, Drd 7, Healing 6
Components: V, S
Casting Time: 1 standard action
Range: Touch
Target: Creature touched
Duration: Instantaneous
Saving Throw: Will negates (harmless)
Spell Resistance: Yes (harmless)

Heal enables you to channel positive energy into a creature to wipe away injury and afflictions. It immediately ends any and all of the following adverse conditions affecting the Target: ability damage, blinded, confused, dazed, dazzled, deafened, diseased, exhausted, fatigued, feebleminded, insanity, nauseated, sickened, stunned, and poisoned. It also cures 10 hit points of damage per level of the caster, to a maximum of 150 points at 15th level.

Heal does not remove negative levels, restore permanently drained levels, or restore permanently drained ability score points.

If used against an undead creature, heal instead acts like harm.

So, we take this spell, split it up into 10 HP segments, and allow it to remove only one status effect at a time.

Makes for a better Cure spell.

Clerics would be able to cast this at close range while Paladins must touch.

Causes Frightened condition on Undead on a failed Will save.

[Lord Charlemagne]

That pushes healing ahead at early levels but then healing will be behind where it is at at 11th level, where your cure spell heals for 60 points of damage while the original heal spell heals for 110 points of damage (unless you aren't getting rid of the original heal spell, which will cause a jump in healing).

This is also leaving aside the fact that for a few levels early on, the cure line of spells work. Cure light wounds & Cure moderate wounds are decently serviceable at the the levels you get them. Not amazing, but if you need a heal in combat they do the trick. And the divine vigor line in a wand can do the out of combat healing.

Heal (the spell) is also fine as a 6th level spell that is worth using sometimes. So you are mostly looking at healing not being worth a theoretical action in combat at levels 5-10.

[Kaelik]

If you are having problems with your party having too little healing give them a wand of Lesser Vigor.

Or a daily uses wand as outlined in Red Rob's Book of Gears.

Attempting to change the cure spells that show up all over the game is a lot more work.

[JonSetanta]

Hmm. I was trying to standardize Cure Wounds, LOH, and Turn Undead.

[Foxwarrior]

Standardizing well-known core content using homebrew doesn't actually make the game simpler. The players already know what Cure Wounds, LOH, and Turn Undead do, then you introduce your standardization and they have to learn another thing.

Now, if you were to write your own game system, then your simple standardized thing would in fact be simpler to learn than if you wrote your own Cure Wounds, LOH, and Turn Undead abilities for your game.

[Omegonthesane]

https://xkcd.com/927/

[JonSetanta]

Ignoring the shit comic link, all I have to say is... Remember every time Frank slipped in Fireball as a level 1 spell?
It was or is Tome core.
We all argued, some supported the decision, but it's essentially homebrew that overrides RAW.

My idea about Heal is like that, but I don't have the clout or insistence to force it on anyone.
Do what you want.

[erik]

Evocation had problems to fix. Healing is actually pretty reasonable and I almost never hear anyone complain that there's too much healing or too little in 3e and its offspring. You're taking one of the few things that isn't broken and trying to "fix" it. That XKCD comic is actually perfect and for precisely the point that Foxwarrior made.

If I were to make any change to healing it would probably be to beef up CSW and CCW a bit since those are the ones usually not keeping up with the combat action economy. I wouldn't change their format since they are already familiar to players. Just changing them to doubling the d8's each level is probably enough to make them worth considering. 4d8+CL for CSW, 8d8+CL for CCW.

[Kaelik]

I disagree with Frank's putting fireball at level one and find it to be the worst of many evocation fixes that people do (and then players voltron together) that said it is not a rewrite of the spell.

Right now Hicks has several classes with Heal at level 1. The thing she does is put Heal as written at level 1 on the spell list, not write a vague paragraph about Heal but not Heal with some changes and how it is replacing cure light wounds and.... lay on hands? But with no explanation of how and still unclear rules for what changes you even want to make to Heal.


Just write "Heal is a level 1 spell" and you would get a lot more traction then trying to pseudo replace a spell on monster lists in traps and in wands all over the game.

(It would still be bad because healing does not need this fix.)

[Omegonthesane]

Evocation had problems to fix. Healing is actually pretty reasonable and I almost never hear anyone complain that there's too much healing or too little in 3e and its offspring. You're taking one of the few things that isn't broken and trying to "fix" it. That XKCD comic is actually perfect and for precisely the point that Foxwarrior made.

The one time I've heard someone complain there was too much healing was following a 3.5 campaign where my LE necromancer cleric just... had a wand of CLW and used it to heal the party instead of relying on his own spell slots. Which was from someone who mistakenly thought that hit points, not spell slots, were the defining limited resource that D&D was functionally balanced around.

[Foxwarrior]

Yeah actually it's a bit weird to me still how the wand of CLW snuck in there... in core if you don't realize that healing wands are super cheap, you'll get a totally different impression about what healing is worth. When I first played, I was surprised to discover that health potions were so overpriced, everybody knows that healing is a potion thing, and I don't think I or anyone else in that group noticed the wands of CLW at the time...

[JonSetanta]

The one time I've heard someone complain there was too much healing was following a 3.5 campaign where my LE necromancer cleric just... had a wand of CLW and used it to heal the party instead of relying on his own spell slots. Which was from someone who mistakenly thought that hit points, not spell slots, were the defining limited resource that D&D was functionally balanced around.

Even then, the only time slots matter is during combat, since out of combat PCs can just take more time (barring exceptions such as plot urgency)

Cure Minor Wounds at will (1 HP) on a slotted item for 1k gold is seriously fine.
I showed this to some players by giving an NPC party one, a staff that did this, and the NPCs still lost.
When the players discovered what the item did, half of them shouted at me for "custom item bullshit" and "munchkin gaming", and voted to replace me as DM.

Kaelik, I'll take that advice on this half-assed Heal notion and stat it up as a new spell when I return from vacation.

[Foxwarrior]

I showed this to some players by giving an NPC party one, a staff that did this, and the NPCs still lost.
When the players discovered what the item did, half of them shouted at me for "custom item bullshit" and "munchkin gaming", and voted to replace me as DM.

I mean, putting infinite 1 HP healing in the hands of an NPC who dies in the fight they're introduced is really not a good way to prove that it's not overpowered. Even if infinite 1 HP healing broke the entire game balance, it still wouldn't be useful in combat.

[JonSetanta]

I'll elaborate.
An NPC party consisting of a Paladin, a Cleric, Rogue, and Wizard.
Using the item was literally a suboptimal choice in the middle of combat, as I proved to the players.

[Kaelik]

I seriously doubt your group was complaining about the introduction of infinite out of combat healing because of it's in combat effect.

I'm going to guess that they believe that it's the infinite out of combat healing part that is the balance concern.

In practice it is very easy to have functionally infinite or literally infinite healing with things like Cure Light Wounds Wands, Lesser Vigor Wands, a Dread Necromancer, whatever. But the players not recognizing that could be legitimately upset by this introduction of an item that ends attrition based gameplay.

[Foxwarrior]

I'll elaborate.
An NPC party consisting of a Paladin, a Cleric, Rogue, and Wizard.
Using the item was literally a suboptimal choice in the middle of combat, as I proved to the players.

This message contains no new relevant information.