Golden Ratio

No, I don't mean (a+b)/a=a/b. I mean the ratio of how many hit points a character has versus how much damage is done versus how much healing is done per round. You could think of this on a party basis or on a character basis. For ease, let's call the three numbers, H (hit points), D (damage taken), and R (recovering hit points). Balancing these factors has a lot of impact on the feel of the game.

Okay, let's look at H versus D. If H is much higher than D you have combats that will go on a long time. If R is also high dropping something will be difficult since after a long time a combatant can easily heal up all that damage. So if H > D then R will have to go down and healing becomes less important. On the other hand if D is higher then combats will be fast and combatants will easily be dropped so R must compensate. This leads to very swingy combat where large heals are crucial so without steady healing combatants will drop like flies.

Okay, now let's compare D versus R. If R > D then you have a situation where healing can outpace damage. It becomes difficult to drop a foe so it must be possible to drop a foe before they can get healed. So the H has to go down. Conversely when D > R, healing essentially just slows down D and it is still a race to see how runs out of hit points first instead of who runs out of healing.

So H versus R isn't too complex. When H > R you have unimportant healers and when R > H you have important healers.

So one issue is in a battle, what resource are you draining? Are you trying to reduce the number of hit points of your foe, to consume all their healing, kill them between heals, or simply have your damage outperform their healing?

Another thing to consider is that these values H,D,R may be different for characters and monsters. For example, monsters may not have the ability to heal and will instead have high hit points while players would have this ability giving the players an edge.

Let's look quickly at World of Warcraft cause many of these ideas and represented in that game. In this game for the characters R >H, meaning that healing is very important. A character with no healer backing him will die fairly quickly. Characters die because they either run out of healing resources, die too fast to be healed, or when D >R and they simply take too much damage for the high levels of healing to match. For monsters it is different, monsters in WoW tend to not be able to heal and often have very high hit points. So it is a struggle to slowly grind down a huge pool of monster hit points while using healing to keep your characters alive.

So how does D&D work? How does it change over levels? How did they change things in 4th edition? Let's look at why characters die:
1) They run out of healing resources
2) They are killed between heals
3) They take damage until they die and heals are only able to slow this process down

Case #1: Running out of healing resources.
Theoretically, D&D is structured so that this is rarely a reason for dying. You should be able to fight 4 encounters and all resources are daily and not encounter resources. So the only time you are supposed to run out of healing resources is when you have used up a lot in previous battles. Now anyone who has actually played 3rd edition D&D at moderate to high levels knows that this really isn't true. Battles can often consume you healing resources. At low levels this happens because you have very limited healing resources and at high levels you often have to churn out so much healing that you can quickly exhaust what you can do. What will typically happen is that one battle won't consume all your healing resources, but enough so that further battles are difficult because you simply don't have those resources.

Case #2: Killed between heals.
Typically you have only one or two healer characters and they may not be able to heal you or reach you for a heal. A lot of damage or a tactical situation can easily make this a possibility. This is possible because D > H and characters often face foes that can kill them in just a few rounds.

Case#3: Damage Taken Outpaces Heals
This also happens, but as healing becomes powerful it typically combines with case #1. You use up all your most powerful heals and your weak heals can't keep up. This situation increases as you gain levels since your weak heals can't keep pace with enemy damage while your strong heals can easily keep up.

So how do you want characters to fail? Which of these situations should be claiming characters lives? Well, in past posts I have always wanted to choose flexibility, and this is no different. You want to have players die because of all three of these situations. So in a way D&D is doing okay, but here is one thing I would change. I would make healing resources more encounter based that would help eliminate the vast divergence between battles where you have plenty of healing resources and those where you don't. Actually weakening the in combat healing, but making it so that you didn't need to worry so much about conserving resources would be useful in my mind. But you also want daily based resources as well. A lot of this has been mulled over in previous posts. This way battles can be about running down or outpacing healing resources without crippling the parties abilities to continue after the battle.

So where did 4th edition go? Well, they made the observation that only a few characters could heal and healing ending up dominating their actions. Those who could do a decent job healing alos were forced to do nothing but heal. Wizards also seemed to feel that healing was not fun job. So they made everyone capable of healing and somewhat reduced the importance of healing. I have not gotten a chance yet to play much 4th edition so I can't really say for certain how healing plays out but I am guessing that it shifts people dying from case #2 to case #1. It is fairly easy to heal significant amounts, but no healing remotely compares to the high level healing of 3rd edition. But the number of heals is fairly limited. Each character can use a healing surge once. Leader characters can allow a sizeable increase in healing, but resource wise I am guessing they can not keep up with damage. So R goes down and D goes down as well. So it becomes more about grinding up hit points faster than the other guy then round to round super-heals.

So is this good? Well, yes if you want healing to take more of a backseat role. So if you feel like you want this the steps of reducing the power of healing as well as reducing the specialized role of healer is probably what you want to do.

Some other approaches to the reduction of the healing role were used in the game Age of Conan. You could make all healing something that a healer does only a few times in combat. Then they would be able to do other stuff. For example, a healer would cast his heal spell. For the next 3 rounds everybody would heal 10 points, but additional castings of this spell would do nothing. Another technique was tying healing to damage. Certain characters healed their allies in an amount based on the damage they did. Another possible technique is using the encounter based mana points I mentioned in a previous post. Healers couldn't heal every turn since some turns would be spent getting mana back. The only problem with this is that healers wouldn't be able to cast non-healing spells while regenerating mana for healing.