Who Needs Heals?
If you’ve ever GM’d for a big tough guy with many muscles, then you may have heard this line before: “I’m too proud to admit it, but you can tell by my gritted teeth and blood-soaked leathers that I’m on my last legs.”
It’s a fine bit of RP. Muscle guy can be a badass warrior, and the party’s designated first aid cabinet with legs has all the info they need to play the game. After all, we’ve all seen the “on a scale of 1 to 62” meme. It’s not too hard to justify “the healer knows you need healing.” But in a sense, we’re all just as blind as Oracle.
This is one of the weird dynamics you’ll run into when crossing from one side to the other of a GM screen. On the one hand, it’s the responsibility of players to see to their own welfare. Injured PCs can poke the healer; the healer can ask for a roll to diagnose. If they wind up charging into the next battle without topping off the ol’ hp tanks, then it’s on them for getting themselves killed. But on the other hand, when the fiction involves character beat to hell and bleeding from 2d6 orifices of their choice, it’s absurd to suggest that “you guys forgot to heal, too bad.”
That leads us directly into our question of the day. When the party walks into a battle and realizes that “oops we forgot to heal,” how do you handle it? Is it better to provide a bit of retcon? Do you make ’em deal with their own folly? Or is this a stupid artifact of an outdated health system and we should all just play Fate? Whatever your take, make all those vociferous gamer opinions known down in the comments!
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Well, RIP to Mr Assassin. Better hope your new coworkers like you enough to rez you because I do not think you made a good first impression
Death is never permanent in Handbook-World! (Unless you’re Thaumaturge.)
…or Gestalt. Or BBEG. Or Necro’s extending/growing family. Or Gunslinger’s happiness. Or Wizards villainous uncle. Or Scabs…
That’s undeath you’re thinking of
Death is generally a prerequisite for undeath.
yes, it does happen every one in a while.
But it’s not a case of forgetting but everyone beeing so equally low on health that the remaining heals won’t get everyone up to 100% or even above 80%.
Instead of playing fate with the heals whoever gets hit first next combat gets healed up first.
Those situations is why Mr Gygax has invented short rests.
hardly anyone plays a dwarf in our group.
What you did there. I see it. And I approve.
Seems assassin had a very short career.
He’s not getting off the adventuring hook that easy!
Pretty sure it was an adventuring axe, wielded by an adventuring blonde.
We haven’t had an issue with the healing because our clerics take such things very seriously. Amusingly, our party recently independently invented the 1-62 meme entirely on our own. Glad to see we aren’t the only ones!
There is no good in-character solution, IMO. So I just roll with a bit of OOC and meta talk. Granted, some systems like Mutants and Masterminds 3e are geared towards rapid recovery… Mage the Ascension’s Life Sphere lets the players just know and abstract the IC/OOC divide because that’s reality and they’re reality warpers and can reality warp up some godlike senses… stuff like Vampire the Masquerade and Werewolf the Apocalypse both give players regenerative powers and low on healing others, so it won’t come up…
Ultimately, in hit points systems, you’ve got to allow it. Though I might consider “That fight took over two thirds of it out of me” instead of “on a scale of 1 to 62”. It’s not perfect, but nothing is. And blurring the line feels like it would strain things less.
In my group we tend to make people deal with it if they forget to heal/choose not to do so, but having that as a long standing policy (and taking care to leave a bit of space for it in the flow as a GM) the former doesn’t really happen anymore.
For the conversations about how wounded people are I prefer to keep that out of character sometimes with a quick heal check but often just with information given, perhaps a bit vaguely.
But in many ways when someone asks “are anyone hurt?” it’s interpreted less as an in-character sentence and more as a clarifying question from the player about what their character is experiencing.
Similar to if they had said “how tall is the room?” or “does anyone wear armor?”
I don’t think it’s ever come up… players tend to be well aware of their health, and I can’t imagine anyone *forgetting* to seek healing for their character. There might be in-game reasons why it doesn’t happen — whether it’s because we’re in a hurry, or because the barbarian isn’t inclined to ask for help no matter how much he needs it — but it’s not because players forgot…
I think it is less a “forgot to heal” situation in most cases, and more a matter of how early in the gaming group are you? In the very fresh and early game, it can be easy to forget a lot of things, but the longer you play together, the more you get to know the quirks of the other players and then anything you forget to do just comes down to mechanics that you are not used to each time (new class, who dis?).
I also think it is perfectly viable to ask the mechanical questions in a game with mechanics involved. Sure, it can be fun to use pure roleplay to describe every little thing that revolves around a series of numbers that define it, but not everyone is as good at parsing the descriptions with the numbers, and just reciting an X out of Y situation can be beneficial when you are trying to move the game forward. Leave the RP in those cases for the times when the numbers are less involved.
As to the specifics of the question, should the group actually forget to heal… well, you CAN always just leave it on their heads, but if a simple round of retroactive Healing Spirit ring around the rosie could resolve that issue and they have the spell slots available, I see no reason one couldn’t just wave a hand or two and say why not.
It’s fun to kill the players (it can even be fun to have been killed), but you should probably also give them a chance at a good fight, after all, this whole hobby is about cooperative play from all sides (at least it is in the best tables I have played at).
Never a problem in my group, either. You could theoretically have an all-cleric team, and one or two players would still insist on blowing half of their ready cash on healing potions before walking to the corner market for a quart of milk.
Warhammer, again, you don’t forget to heal because in most rules (Death Watch marines exluded, mostly) a single his has potential to kill or maim you. If you are in middle of dungeon and no healing draught available or no one took Heal skill you either run like Felix wishes he could when Gotrek has new death wish or prepare for a last stand.
As I usually play the healer in my groups, I always specialize in athletics for when the party decides to go off without important healing being done. I will *literally* drag you back into the room by your neck if that’s what it takes to get you to sit down and let me heal you.
Nice, you’d make a perfect Medic for Only War. Almost over looked class due to relative fragility of your team mates when it’s likelier(or more efficient) to just make new character.
I tend to be the kind of person who’s allergic to not getting attached to specific characters, so I like to play builds that keep myself and my allies alive. I’ve never actually tried Only War, but the 40k universe (at least, I assume it’s a 40k game?) seems neat to me.
If they forget to heal, as a DM I usually make sure to engage in a Hearty Laugh(tm) and tell them “oops” before proceeding to have the monsters beat the snot out of them anyway. If i can run an entire dungeon, they can remember one character each.
On a related note, my party rarely forgets to heal between fights anymore.
“I’m too proud to admit it, but you can tell by my gritted teeth and blood-soaked leather’s that I’m on my last legs.”
This attitude is why adventurers die young. My Fighter lives up to his 15 Wisdom- it doesn’t matter if others think less of him for asking for help, he knows that almost anyone else would have died five times over.
Healing spells are generally a waste. Take a short rest and spend your hit die.
Is Assassin Rogue dead?
That depends on the system and the situation.
In Pathfinder (1st edition) you do not recover any hit points.
And even in D&D 5th edition, if you’re in a hurry, chasing a messenger or trying to reach the good king in time, you might have time for a few rounds of cures, you will not have the time for an hour of rest.
In D&D specifically it’s made all the more weird by how hit points are a very very abstract thing and any attempt at making a direct damage-number-to-real-life-wound-description is going to end up absurd as players gain levels and hit dice and hit points. Like losing 50 hit points is enough to kill a level 1 commoner ten times over, but a mid-level fighter can survive that. So you can look at percentage of hit points instead of absolute number, but then you run into the other weirdness that magical healing is more powerful on a level 1 commoner than on your mid-level fighter. Because healing 8 hit points is more than the Commoner had to lose in the first place, while healing 24 hit points can be far from enough to recover for an adventurer.
This is why I prefer the way GURPS deals with heals. You heal more if you have more. If you have 1-19 HP, you heal normally. At 20-29 you heal twice as much when you heal, 31-39 3x as much, etc.
So instead of the healing spells scaling up, the spells remain the same, but the healing you get scales up with your HP.
Now granted, GURPS also doesn’t have levels or any of the nonsense that comes with that, so most PCs Hp remain fairly consistent as they increase in power, growing a little every now and then and most PCs (in Dungeon Fantasy) will have between 20-30 HP max, and many (non-fighter type) PCs will never max their HP, like Wizards, Bards, Thieves, they’ll have probably around 12-16 and feel good about it. The fighter types will be uping HP and will eventually max it if they survive and the campaign goes long enough.
For D&D it would be something like the spell would remain consistent, but the healed person would get bonus extra healing based on Hit Dice, Level and other optional benes (like Feats or Class Abilities).
If they die, they die. If the enemy can retreat and fight another day, so can the player-characters. Go in low on health, you take risks or cut-and-run.
Never had people forget to heal. I do often have the Healbots… err… Clerics opt to //not// heal my Ogress Barbarian Wrestler because it’s //harder// to heal her and she rarely even notices the small wounds she accumulates until suddenly she’s down to half HP.
But that last bit is her (my) fault, she rhino hides.
As for the harder to heal, since she’s larger (basically “3 times larger”) than regular sized folk, GURPS rules means she’s more costly to cast spells on, 3 times as costly, so a Heal that might take 5 FP (that’s Fatigue points – GURPS doesn’t use spell slots) costs 9 FP, which can leave a Healbo- Cleric out of gas. So often they’ll cast smaller heals, enough to stop bleeding, and give her s tiny bump back towards full HP, and then forget later when they’ve refilled their FP reserves.
She’s also Magically Resistant (said to rhyme like “Magically Delicious”), so heal spells will fail more often on her (and potions are basically worthless), and that adds even more penalties for the Clerics. Essentially, I made a character that is all kinds of broken both in “good” ways – super tough, super deadly – but also broken in “bad” ways – super hard to heal, costly to heal, extremely costly to equip (which is why she’s a Barbarian Wrestler, super tough, super deadly, and doesn’t require a lot of equipment, like armor or weapons, or clothes…).
She’s basically been walking wounded through every mission since the first mission as she never takes time off to heal up and isn’t smart enough to pay for full heals in town… but that’s fine, she’s a walking mountain of meat, so she soaks wounds that would flat out cripple or kill others and not even slow down.
I’ve never seen it happen. Not once in thirty years of GMing.
There are some reasons for that (a lot of that time was GMing Palladium which nearly doesn’t have any sort of healing at all other than ‘lay in bed for two months’), but I’ve literally never once seen a party forget to heal provided they COULD heal up.
Me: Um, guys, i made some accounts and i think we died three encounters ago.
DM: What?¡ Let me… check… that…
…
DM: I will need you all to roll several constitution saves 😛
Haven’t seen the problem of characters forgetting to heal. Sometimes it’s actually the opposite and the fighter is being a big baby who refuses to move until they’ve been restored to 100% HP – even if that means demanding someone use up a limited heal ability for 1-3hp at high level.
Since I primarily use Roll 20, something I like to do is set it up so that simple HP bars are visible to other players. So everyone can see a rough estimate of their party member’s health – but the actual numbers are hidden unless it is your character.
The funny thing is, going by the Pathfinder rules, Oracle is full of bullshit – the ‘Clouded Vision’ curse doesn’t actually blind you completely, its blindness only affecting sight beyond 30ft. Of you.
She could be blind even beyond her class features, some people just are and it’s not like Oracles get immunity to that sort of thing after all.
Oracle is not sure why Assassin chose to engage in mid-dungeon planking, but she’s not one to judge a book by its cover (unless it has that new book smell).
The fact Oracle is blind and most healing spells involve touching the recipient, there must have been some painful or embarrassing accidents in her career as a healer. Especially with the default height she’d reach for.
Our Roll20 games utilize hp bars without exact numbers. Thus, we can estimate the health of allies (important for healers or in the case of 4e, bloodied status and other cooperative power details) as well as enemies.
It’s odd how by the rules, this kind of situation is resolved by casting the ‘status’ spell – which outright tells you the meta knowledge any healer would want.
Of course, since it’s a non-cantrip spell, unless they can cast it at will or for free, it’s a spell nobody actually bothers using. Kind of like how detect evil is almost exclusively cast via Paladin or other ‘spammable’ versions of it.
I’m hearing an idea that maybe healers should get an inherent status spell just like how Paladins get their Detect Evil.
I kinda like it.
I’ve certainly run into this a few times…. but also not like *all* the time. Because D&D is a weird system where you have to balance the fiction that people can be grievously injured but basically ok even at 1 hp…. which would be very dangerous to go into another combat into…. but not if they took a modest paced walk to get to it (ie short rest)… in which case they’re probably more or less completely healthy again.
For myself, it’s sort of hard to say. I tend to run games in ways where it’s inconceivable that people didn’t have time to heal… if they had enough time to do so at all. Which is partially an artifact of the system. You can’t realistically put a party through 10+ fights in a single day and expect them to live (…looking at you Hoard of the Dragon Queen). So then I don’t bother designing fictionally scenarios that’d do that. In which case there’s either like maybe three combat encounters in an eventful day (with likely large breaks of time to get from point A to point B where they couldn’t have failed to short rest if they tried) or…. more often just a single fight on days where there’s any fights at all.
So yeah, mostly as a GM I’m pretty giving with the retroactive healing if people forgot about it.
The bigger issue I’ve run into as a player is less often “we forgot” but more the GM not giving us time (either the scenario is too hectic for us to have the time to do so, we just don’t have the resources, or the GM is being extremely strict with that whole “1 hour” thing… and sometimes actually breaking the rules strict by declaring we couldn’t short rest and walk at the same time and only telling us that *after* the fact).
Now I dunno about abandoning D&D for *Fate* specifically. But just because I don’t love the mechanical design of Fate and think Blades in the Dark accomplishes what Fate claims it’s trying to much better. =P
This reminds of the time I was playing a cleric and asked a fellow player how many hit points did he need? He responded with “Your character wouldn’t know that info.” To which point I responded with “Yep. Guess you don’t need healing then.”
He soon changed his policy on hit points. 😉
As a GM, I tend to let players heal up if they forgot too previously. I’m more interested in weaving a entertaining story than I am in killing them (too easy for a GM anyways). Plus we all make mistakes, so I tend be more lenient.
As a gm, I’m fairly unforgiving of such lapses of focus. As a player I have a hard time even remembering my characters’ status from session to session. At what point do players have a responsibility to tend to their characters proactively, in a participatory manner? If one simply expects the gm to retrofit a situation, why would the gm even bother having players? Of course there are circumstances in which the problem could/should be rectified – as Ramsus states above, the flip side of player screw-ups is the gm screw-up.
it’s been so long since I’ve played a DnD type game, the last few years I’ve mostly been playing Chronicles of darkness (specifically mage the awakening) where the question is more how much bed rest is my character going to need before her next outing, or if the injury is bad enough, how is she going to explain these wounds to the hospital
I never really got into the Noun: the Verbening series, probably due to how the metaplot wound up being an absolute mess by the end and the original system was contorted into situations it never should have gone into for most of the gamelines.
Also, on the Fate stuff, it’s one of those things next to gurps where it builds up really good (or at least decent) settings but I would never use the systems themselves because of their flaws.
Play Fate lol. Consequences are fun!
To me, Fate and its ilk are on the more “freeform” and casual side of things. Not saying they are bad, just saying they have their own style which isn’t really the best.
TBH, there is a fine line between “maintaining believability” and “coddling players from consequences.” I would allow them to heal, since it would be an obvious thing to do, but if the players explicitly portray themselves as rushed or in a hurry then consequences are consequences.