A Look At – 4th Edition D&D

by Jim Yoho

Part Two – Quick Healing, History of Healing in D&D, and Fun vs. “Boredum”

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It has been awhile, but I’m back with the next step of my in-depth look at 4th Edition D&D. Previously I discussed how WotC fixed problems in previous editions of D&D, what I thought some of those problems were, how they borrowed from what MMO’s can teach about game design and what Defined Roles were.

4th Edition learned many things from MMO’s, as I stated before, and much of that is on how to keep players having fun and not have to sludge through long, boring tasks. Of course this was a lesson the MMO’s took a freaking long time themselves to learn, and are still trying to learn (they rely too much on repetitive tasks to fill time and make the game seem to have more content.) One aspect of this that D&D has finally tackled is healing.

Healing in most role-playing games is done in a way that attempts to simulate reality, often to the game’s detriment. And, as a result, many people playing these games ignore the mechanics of healing to just make the game run faster. To actually use most game’s healing mechanics (which most player character will be laid-up for days as a result of one moderate combat) is cumbersome.

Take 3.5 D&D, for example. Some 1st level characters are in a tough fight. You have a fighter, a cleric, a wizard, and a rogue in the party, and each (save the lucky wizard, we’ll say) is hurt. Say the fighter is down eight hit points, the cleric is down five, and the rogue is down four. Without magic, to fully heal, the party will need eight nights of sleep assuming the fighter doesn’t get injured in the eight days, or four days of complete bed rest with no activity (healing is 1 point per level of eight hours of uninterrupted sleep, or double that if you have complete bed rest for 24 hours.) If the cleric casts Cure Light Wounds after every rest, it’d still take three days of rest no matter how you slice it, and that’s if he rolls high enough on the random healing amount per spell.

And I’m not picking on 3.5 – that’s, more or less, how healing has worked in D&D period. Most other RPGs are very similar in the tiny amount of healing that comes from resting. Not all, but most.

Now, yes, it is a game where you can say “after the battle you rest a week and come back to the dungeon” and that takes all of a few seconds real time, but that pulls from the drama of the game and just feels goofy. Many games I was involved in basically “super-sped” healing, as in you got most if not all of your health back after resting. That’s great for fun, but it stifles the healing abilities of some players’ characters. (I know with the GM hand-waving of healing in the Star Wars game I play, my medic sure feels useless and I often get the “It takes you ten minutes for surgery? Forget it, my character isn’t waiting that long” as the players know the GM will magically heal everyone to keep the story flowing faster.) And it completely ignores the mechanics of the game.

Quick Healing is what I’m calling the mechanics set up by WotC for 4th Edition, and let me tell you I love it. You see, every character gets these things called Healing Surges – the number depends on your class, level, and if you take a Feat called Durable. How they work is pure game design brilliance, at least in my opinion.

You spend a Healing Surge to regain 1/4th your total hit points. There are several ways you can use them. The most common is, after a combat encounter, the party takes a short rest (5 minutes in game) and doing that not only recovers all used Encounter Powers (more on those next time) but allows each player to spend as many Surges as necessary to get up to full health (as long as they have enough left – you recover your Healing Surges after an Extended Rest which is the standard 6 hours of uninterrupted recovery, sleep or relaxation.) So, right there, if a party of 1st level adventurers just survived a tough encounter they take 5 minutes, catch their breath, and move on ready for more!

But wait, it gets better. The next use of Healing Surges is in combat. If a character is badly hurt, any character regardless of class can take their Second Wind. You only get one of those per encounter, but they are pretty cool – you spend a Healing Surge, regain 1/4th your total hit points, and get a +2 to all defenses until your next turn. So, in combat, a lucky hit by an enemy doesn’t send you off running to hide.

What good are Clerics and other healers at this point, you may ask? We’re getting to them now with the third use of Healing Surges. All Leader classes (of which the Cleric is one) can, twice per encounter, kick off another player character’s Healing Surge for them and usually with some sort of bonus to how many hit points are recovered. A Cleric (and most other Leaders) also have other Powers that let them kick off Healing Surges or even give back hit points without using a Healing Surge. That’d be the Cleric’s Utility Power of Cure Light Wounds at 2nd level, assuming the Cleric choses that Power. Or the Paladin, with Lay On Hands, can spend her own Healing Surges to heal other characters. And if you drink a Healing Potion it, too, uses Healing Surges but usually with a bonus as well.

There’s more to Healing Surges (such as being taken as penalties for failing Skill Challenge checks) but as far as healing goes you get the idea. And this is why I call it Quick Healing – the game mechanics are designed for fast paced action and adventure. Parties no longer need to rest after every battle or two (especially with the addition of At-Will Powers and the removal of numbers of spells per level), nor do DM’s need to do some hand-waving and ignore the game mechanics just to get the party healed up fully and ready to go the next day.

This is just another example of why 4th Edition is designed from the ground up to remove “boredum” and add the “fun.” Something it learned from MMOs – no one wants to sit around resting while others are running off killing orcs and finding treasure! This is a game, not a reenactment! Quick Healing is a big step in the right direction in making action/combat based RPGs more accessible to players used to fast-paced video games and to those who like more action than drama class from their games.

MMO’s used to be level treadmills – the grind of repetitious acts (farming, camping, etc.) to gain experience and gold to level up your character and upgrade their equipment. That was under the assumption that RPGs were popular due to leveling up characters solely. While an important aspect of RPGs, it’s not the end-all be-all and for many people the mind-numbingly boring tasks you had to do over and over again to craft or to kill enough to gain XP was the opposite of fun – it was work. MMO’s evovled to add simple plots, non-combat quests and beautiful landscapes to explore – and as a result the game became more fun. And they started to do away with needing to rest (early games you really did need to rest!) and let you quickly recover health and power (mana, stamina, whatever) shortly after combat ended. One use abilities became multiple use abilities. And, finally, MMOs more and more learned about communities and social RPing and you are starting to see focus on group building, story building, and the like. Thousands of players giving instant feedback constantly can really hone your game structure – something table-top RPGs have never had access to, but can clearly benefit from MMO’s experience for what makes an RPG fun.

Any role-playing game can be fun if all you are focusing on is acting in character – you don’t even need game mechanics for that. You don’t really need many rules at all for improv theater. And you can add that level of RP to any RPG. What game books, the rules mechanics, need to do is create a framework for challenges that aren’t based on how well players can articulate or assume personas. How do you measure which character can do what better, and how do the characters overcome the challenges placed before them? How do characters grow, how do the obstacles become more difficult? Rules can be a hindrance, they can often be the biggest roadblock to fun if they are obtuse, complex, or simply voluminous (I’m looking at the sheer number of books WotC likes to put out here.) But when well designed and simplified (I’ll get to a good aspect of this next time as well) rules are aides in making a game fun!

And, after all, a game is meant to be about fun. Some people find fun in adopting another identity and speaking as that character. Others enjoy pouring through multiple, multiple books to build the “best” character they can. Still others like proving they are the toughest in the party. Puzzle solving is the most fun for players of another stripe as well. What 4th Edition does is make the combat system easy, quick, and fun – and with that done, all the other game aspects have to take less of a back seat.

Next time I’m going to look at Powers and what their addition to D&D means, how 4th Edition has almost completely wiped out Min/Maxing, and what some simplified rules look like.