D&D (2024) Should healing word require hit dice?

[MarkB]

I see your point, but I felt that it was kind of necessary given that 4e was built on largely encounter based resources- as long as you could be healed, you could keep adventuring forever. It was also good to teach players not to be reckless, since if you took a lot of damage and used up your healing surges, you weren't going to be very useful in later combats.

The only thing I didn't like was monsters who could steal healing surges; there's nothing like being a Defender down to 2 healing surges after a fight for having the nerve to, well, defend.

I always felt that 4e did a poor job by keeping the terminology of earlier editions for its combat healing. The way I always envisioned it was that spending healing surges wasn't curing wounds, it was binding them up to not hinder you in combat, with potions or magic simply improving the quality of that first aid.

Healing surges were basically a second health track for characters, such that a character who was at full HP but down to their last healing surge was still heavily wounded narratively speaking.

 

[DeviousQuail]

I'm a fan of healing not being able to keep up with damage in an encounter. Any additional healing should limited to not mess with that. However, Dwarves with the Dwarven Fortitude feat haven't broken anything yet so we should be okay. I also really like the idea of having different kinds of healing too. If Healing Word was "Target's Hit Die + Con (minimum 1)" that would make it very different to other healing spells. It can still do the job of healing even if the target has no hit dice, but it is much more potent for those that have hit dice. Make Mass Healing Word do the same but with more people. Upcasting allows the use of more hit dice for both spells.

Right now the only benefit Cure Wounds has is 1d8 instead of 1d4 healing. Otherwise it requires more action economy, potential movement, and more components. With this change the comparison becomes:

• HW's variable healing (1d6+1 up to 1d12+5, or 1 to 5 if target has no HD) vs CW's standard healing (1d8+Caster Mod, which ime is +2 or better)
• HW's resource use (spell slot + Hit Die) vs CW's resource use (spell slot)
• HW's action economy (bonus action, range) vs CW's action economy (action, touch)
• HW's components (V) vs CW's components (VS)

 

[Blue]

Now, while from my earlier post I was very against using HD (see that post for why), all of the reasons are based around there being a limited number of HD.

But unlimited HD is just a healing die then... unless it's not.

We could look at how 13th Age does this. It has a lot of 4e DNA (since the lead designer of 4e, Rob Heinsoo, was one of the two designers of 13th Age). Since 4e was GSL instead of OGL they needed to file off some serial numbers but they kept the concept of Healing Surges (and Bloodied, which I'll get to in a minute.)

So how did they solve this? Most classes had 7 Healing Surges/Hit Dice/"Recoveries" regardless of level - the amount they healed went up. All healing triggered these and then usually added something, plus you could spend an action to trigger it once per battle*. (* You could try more than once but it was unreliable and might just waste the action.)

But the interesting thing for this discussion was what about it something required you to spend a HD when you had none left? In that case you only got half the healing expected, and you took a cumulative -1 to all d20 checks that stayed until you took a full heal up. (Read: Long Rest, though there are technical differences.)

BTW, I mentioned Bloodied. You know the concept of HP as partially fatigue, battle, luck, and the like? Well, if after a battle (or likely a Short Rest in 5e terms) you were required to heal up to half of your HPs and remove yourself from Bloodied. (Or "Staggered" since the term Bloodied wasn't available.) So if you ran out of HD/Surges/Recoveries you'd end up with some cumulative penalties until you can rest.

Something like this can remove the issues I had caused to the casters by limited HD of the target, making this concept work smoother.

 

[kigmatzomat]

I voted "fine as is" because d&d doesn't, and has never, believe in accumulating penalties/wounds/etc.

My personal preference is Earthdawn's "would threshold" mechanism but I also like Step dice.

 

[Reynard]

So one of the issues I have is the 0hp + healing word combo.

Mainly there is no point in healing until someone drops to 0. And then it's a bonus action to negate the last hit.

So what if healing word requires a hit die? Still useful for getting someone up in combat, but not 50 times a day.

Some other healing spells might require it too.
Could even have a cantrip that let someone spend hit dice as an action.

This isn't a healing problem, it's a tactics problem. If there is no cost for folks to be down, unconscious and then prone, the tactical aspect of the game isn't living up to the positioning requirements. If you are going to ask folks to count squares, make it worth it.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

So one of the issues I have is the 0hp + healing word combo.

Mainly there is no point in healing until someone drops to 0. And then it's a bonus action to negate the last hit.

So what if healing word requires a hit die? Still useful for getting someone up in combat, but not 50 times a day.

Some other healing spells might require it too.
Could even have a cantrip that let someone spend hit dice as an action.

While I think the premise is incorrect, I agree with the conclusion. It improves the game to have healing cost more than a spell slot.

Fight IME still go much better when healing is proactive rather than the healers waiting until someone is down to heal them, though.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

Healing Word's fine. I might view it as a problem if it was handed out to half casters, who where going to be using their action to attack anyway, but for the overwhelming majority of Bards, Clerics, and Druids (the classes who get it), using Healing Word vs. Cure Wounds still means that the main thing they are doing with their turn is casting a level 1 healing spell, they just still get to cast a cantrip or make a weapon attack. There are optimized edge-cases where this is still devastating, but optimizers are going to optimize.

If there is a problem it is that the additional healing from Cure Wounds is too little to be worth using instead. It's not worth moving to the fallen comrade and using an action rather than a bonus action just to get them an average of 2 more hit points per spell level. If I was going to change the low level healing magic regime of 5e D&D, it would probably be to give beneficiaries of Cure Wounds the opportunity to burn hit die for extra healing. I think a fair number of anti-Healing Word people's real objection is that they want the main level one healing spell to be Cure Wounds, because that's what it was in all the other versions of D&D they've played, and in 5e it's the trap choice for anyone who can take Healing Word.

I will say I have really only found the up from zero system of 5e frustrating or irritating in one situation, and that is when I am playing the video game version of the ruleset, Solasta: Crown of the Magister and all the enemy behavior is preprogrammed, combats go by quick, my level of investment in characters is negligible, and I can restart from the beginning of combat at any point. The habit of enemies there to leave dying enemies alone, but prioritize prone but just healed enemies, also just results in a lot more whack-a-mole than I've ever seen in real table play. At an actual table, when actual characters are even slightly at stake, death is a nontrivial event, the DM is able to sometimes go easy on the just healed PC or up the tension by going for killshot on a dying one, and, you know, people are roleplaying the relatively lax rules for rescuing someone from zero don't bother me, and seems a reasonable concession to letting everyone stay in the game and not chaining people to a healer role.

 

[Horwath]

Rework cure wounds.

you can use a HD for every "level" of cure spells.
if you do not use a HD, you heal for minimum amount.

Cure wounds:

1 Action cast, touch range. 1d8/spell level + cast mod
1 Bonus action cast, touch range. 1d6/spell level + cast mod
1 Action cast, 60ft range. 1d6/spell level + cast mod
1 Bonus action cast, 60ft range. 1d4/spell level + cast mod
1 Minute cast. 10HP per level + cast mod. Any HD spend with this version is maxed.

 

[Leatherhead]

Nerfing Healing Word will not make Combat Healing more effective.

If you want to make Combat Healing a real option for a character, you must first significantly up the amount of healing that a healer can produce per action. We are talking three rounds worth of actions Per Heal (based on Monster DPR per Level). For those that need the visual:
Cure Wounds would have to be rocking 4d8+Mod healing as a level 1 spell with no upcast.

 

[Charlaquin]

I said yes, but because I want more uses of hit dice as a resource, not because healing word specifically needs fixing. Personally, I’d be in favor of most (though not all) healing sources requiring you to spend a hit die.