the most challenging and time consuming thing a DM has to do is keep track of the innumerable details of their world and be prepared for the most likely things the players will do/face in a game (published or not), even if 5e had no combat or dice rolls that aspect would still be present
Most new DMs I've interacted with are prepared for that part just fine.
They're less prepared for "How can I tell if this combat is too hard/too easy?", "What loot should players be getting?", "How often should they be resting and how do I fix it if they're resting too often?", "What do this monster's spells do?", "How do I keep combats interesting?", "What's the right DC for this check?", "How do I deal with this player who keeps summoning a bunch of fucking wolves?", "This player wants to buy a +1 sword; how does that work?", and so on.
If finding a DM is a core issue for all TTRPGs, then it should follow that - in order to fix that problem - the most important design element of a well-designed TTRPG is ease of use by the DM, a metric 5e scores particularly poorly on.
I highly disagree with that assessment. It's the easiest system i've dealt with in 10 years.
Sure, I imagine "ignore the rules and make it all up, you don't even need the books, it's an imagination game" is a pretty simple system. It's also not actually 5e, though.
If finding a DM is a core issue for all TTRPGs, then it should follow that - in order to fix that problem - the most important design element of a well-designed TTRPG is ease of use by the DM, a metric 5e scores particularly poorly on.
I highly disagree with that assessment. It's the easiest system i've dealt with in 10 years.
I would suggest that the fact you've got over a decade's experience in DMing is a key component as to why you find 5e so easy to run.
I just don't find "healing magic is bad because you can just give your players access to as many potions as you want therefore bad game design" to be a very compelling argument.
Because limiting potions is a basic common sense thing that literally every DM I have ever known has done without having to really think about it. I don't think it needs to be defined in the rules.
Now, saying that there isn't enough money sinks in the rules is another thing. I can see that being an issue.
But healing magic has always been important to me and every party I've played with, because unlimited availability potions is a silly thing that never happens.
Ok. So, let's say the argument isn't "unlimited" potions. Let's call it; more than 0. Specifically, my party of 4 level 3 adventurers (a cleric, a druid, a bard, and a warlock) are investigating / solving a problem a local logging guild is having with their forest. Namely, that the forest is super pissed that the foreman took an axe enchanted with the soul of an angry Oni. It parallels the corruption of the Druid's home forest, giving ties and motivation for figuring out how to solve this problem. Now, my party make up is similar to "generic" parties in that they have <Ideal Target> for incoming damage, <Secondary Target> for incoming damage, and this party even has some mitigation on both "squishy" targets for <Non-Ideal Target>s for incoming damage. Their incentives are similar to other generic parties, but let's be specific:
They are incentivized to end fights early, have incoming damage hit temporary hit points (druid wildshape / Warlock fiend patron HP), and heal using Song of Rest and hit dice. If they need an emergency in combat heal, they're incentivized to use the potions first, because Spell Slots are also a major source of damage for this party, and doing damage to an enemy stops incoming damage faster, while healing party members merely ablates their risk of death to the next attack. So, obviously, the "smart" play is:
Have damage miss against the cleric (highest ac) > Have damage hit the Druid in wildshape > have damage hit the Warlock fiend patron temporary HP > end fights fast so incoming damage stops > heal outside combat with resources that cannot be used to end fights faster (hit dice / potions) > heal during combat with single use resources (potions / lay on hands / gaining temp HP from the Warlock) > heal during combat with multi use resources (spell slots)
My players are new to TTRPGs. They've played in a limited number of other games. I never discuss optimal strategies, but do my absolute best to explain rules to the fullest extent to which I understand them. I never second guess player choices, and when players learn more about the system, I let them change things using the new information they've come to understand.
They still get that they should never use spell slots on healing abilities, except as an absolute last resort, because that's what the system tells them to do. Now, as the DM, it's my prerogative to challenge my player's "ideal combat scenario" plan, but you can only do that so much before it feels like a screw job. "Oh, I know Mr. Cleric, that you just put yourself directly in this Owlbear's path, but he's going to charge past you towards the squishy bard hiding behind a bush...for reasons...."
D&D 5E presents itself as a game, in addition to being RP, and honestly, the game portion is feeling pretty lacking. Even my players, who have steadfastly refused to play any of the other systems I've run as one shots are starting to come to this conclusion themselves. So not only has WotC lost a paying customer (me, the DM), they're also starting to lose the captive audience, who were driven in by curiosity/Twitch streams.
If your defense of 5E revolves around the idea that the rules and systems are unimportant because the DM can just balance/iterate/adjust/test/design new systems, well....again, why are we using 5E? Why are we spending $50/book on splat and so forth if the things being presented aren't balanced and tested? So, not only does the DM have to be good at running a game, they also have to learn the fundamentals of game design, of player incentives, of what makes a story good / engaging / interesting?
You don't think that somewhat limits the availability of DMs?
Like, being a good DM is hard. It takes time, practice, honest self assessment, more practice, learning, reading...etc. It takes good group social management, improv, acting, a sense of narrative structures. It takes time to develop all those things, for sure. And learning those things from one book might be tough!
But I'd argue that it's more important to talk about those things in something like the Dungeon Master's Guide than it is to present non-solution solutions like "A fort is 50k gold and your players may want to build one eventually!"
If your advice for dealing with rules often comes down to "ignore that rule"...maybe the problem is with the rules, and not with the person asking how to use the rules?
In my experience, as a new-to-TTRPG player/DM, here's how it's broken down:
The first DM, as I mentioned in my previous post, quit after 4 sessions of running Lost Mines of Phandelver, because he was too stressed trying to make things up on the fly when the system just presents information and no context. Then, as a DM, 4 of my players (out of a total of about 10 people I've DM'd for) were inspired to try to run their own games. Technically, everyone I've run a game for has wanted to then run their own game, but most weren't able to get schedules / players worked out. So, I'm only talking about the 4 that actually went on to get their own games going.
All of them have quit or burned out.
Plus, my game *barely* resembles base 5E. Any time I *try* to run a published adventure, I am immediately reminded why I, by and large, don't. I've stopped buying WotC products. I've stopped recommending D&D 5E to people looking to run games. I don't advocate for the D&D brand.
How is that a good outcome? If you started with a motivated, interested person, and the end result is someone who is only using your product begrudgingly?
See and this doesn't reflect my experiences at all.
Any player I've ever known that has healing potions is reluctant to use them over healing spells, because spells come back and potions don't. It's the classic "but what if I need it later" situation a lot of the time.
On top of that I find that players that tend to put healing spells on their list want to heal people with their magic.
And I never said to ignore a rule. Healing potions being infinitely in stock is not a rule.
So some people have talked about the spell in passing but I wanted to shine a brighter spotlight on it.
I love Healing Spirit. And for the life of me I don't fully understand the cries for wanting it nerfed. I've seen people argue that "Healing Spirit is straight broken and needs to be house rules and nerfed away" while also saying "Healing spells in combat are a wasted spell slot". I know that Healing Spirit out of combat can pretty much get the party back up to full depending on the spell level used but ... I don't see why that's a bad thing? A character who wants to play a Healer type in this game ONLY has Healing Spirit to rely on as far as "bang for your buck". If used in combat (and it's a good spell so it's ACTUALLY worth using in combat too), it still has a chance of losing concentration. But for some reason, doing 2d6 in healing as a 3rd level spell is somehow busted compared to 3d10 points of lightning damage from Call Lightning?
And my wording is probably far more confrontational than my intent, but really my biggest disagreement with the spell is that Clerics don't also have a decent healing spell to live out the Healer fantasy if that's what they wanted to focus on.
The thing with Healing Spirit is that while most of the healing spells before it were undertuned, it goes much too far in the other direction.
Healing Spirit is a bonus action to cast, and heals each friendly creature for 1d6 each turn it's able to enter the spirit's space, for 10 turns, and each packet is increased by 1d6 per spell level as it scales.
Compare to the previous 'good' bonus action heal, Healing Word: As a bonus action (and cast as a second-level spell for parity with Spirit), it heals 1 creature for 2d4+5 and scales by 1d4 per spell level.
Healing Word heals 1 guy for 10 HP. Healing Spirit heals the whole party for an average of 35 HP each. Each time you uplevel it, Word gets an extra 2.5 points of healing while Spirit gets another 35 per target. Granted you won't get full value out of Spirit in-combat, since not everyone will be able to get to it every turn, but even at 1/4 of its value it still more than doubles Word's healing on each of its multiple targets, at the same action and slot cost.
Your other point of comparison for out-of-combat healing is Prayer of Healing, which takes 10 minutes to cast and heals the whole party for 2d8+5 - an average of 14.
Spirit takes 1 minute to cycle through and, again, heals the whole party for 10d6 - an average of 35, nearly twice what Prayer does for the same slot in 1/10th the time. And if you scale it, Prayer gives everybody an additional 4.5 points of healing, while Spirit gives everybody an additional 35.
Prior to Healing Spirit, healing spells were undertuned and most of the non-bonus-action ones probably needed to heal ~50% more than they do to be attractive options. Instead of doing that, Healing Spirit came in healing for anywhere from twice as much to twenty times as much, with the best casting time, the best base healing, the most targets affected, and the best scaling of any healing spell of similar level.
And then we got several different slapdash 'fixes' from devs via Twitter, all of which reduced the amount of healing it does, but not by enough to stop it from still being two or three times more healing than all the other options.
"We've got one bonus action spell that heals one guy for 10, and another that heals everybody for 35 each? Well, I see the problem: that second spell should only heal multiple targets for an average of 35 total, divided more or less as you choose. Also, it should still scale fourteen times as well as the first one, since we reduced its baseline healing to be only three times better. There, I fixed it!"
I get that errors slip through and it's impossible to catch everything in playtesting, but jesus. Healing Spirit is not a small error, and the fixes were still fucked up like they didn't even bother to re-check their math. It's the equivalent of ordering a dozen loaves of bread and having the baker accidentally give you nearly three hundred loaves without noticing, and then, when you correct him, having him go "oh, my mistake. Sometimes small issues slip through the cracks, you know how it is. Here's your dozen loaves" before immediately handing you seventy fucking loaves again.
See this is where I disagree heavily. You're comparing how OP Healing Spirit is to other Healing Spells. But other Healing Spells suck. And I don't think it's an error. They may have stated in a tweet that it slipped through the cracks but they have a tendency to quickly react to players reacting as they did with the Ranger.
I'm comparing Healing Spirit to other spells that output damage and find that they can tend to even out. Out of combat, at level 3, Fireball does 8d6 damage to a potential room full of things and it's a burst, immediate up front amount of damage. How good Healing Spirit heals at level 3 (which is 2d6) over the course of 1 minute, assuming everyone got hit by that fireball and failed their saving throw, you are sacrificing up front, on demand Healing for healing over time which is how I personally see things should be balanced. Same with something like Call Lightning. It does less up front damage then fireball at 3d10 but if you hold the concentration, you can do it every round.
But that's just talking spells. Eldritch Blast/Heavy Crossbow/Longbow every round just way out damages anything that healing spirit can keep up with AND it uses a spell slot/resource where as the other things do not.
So really what it is, Damage has always been the king and healing has never been able to keep up in 5e. Now they FINALLY publish a spell for people who like to heal and people are calling it OP when comparing it to Healing spells, which it is, sure. But NOT when compared to damage out put vs the healing gained.
So if the Druid wants to use it out of combat to help the group, awesome! Keep the party moving! It doesn't affect anything. If they want to use it in combat where it's still actually pretty good, then AWESOME even more so as they are having to hold concentration which means giving up other concentration spells to do. Like we wildly disagree and when you use the words like calling it an error to even exist, it just sounds insulting to someone like myself because your words don't imply it as an "opinion" anymore.
So some people have talked about the spell in passing but I wanted to shine a brighter spotlight on it.
I love Healing Spirit. And for the life of me I don't fully understand the cries for wanting it nerfed. I've seen people argue that "Healing Spirit is straight broken and needs to be house rules and nerfed away" while also saying "Healing spells in combat are a wasted spell slot". I know that Healing Spirit out of combat can pretty much get the party back up to full depending on the spell level used but ... I don't see why that's a bad thing? A character who wants to play a Healer type in this game ONLY has Healing Spirit to rely on as far as "bang for your buck". If used in combat (and it's a good spell so it's ACTUALLY worth using in combat too), it still has a chance of losing concentration. But for some reason, doing 2d6 in healing as a 3rd level spell is somehow busted compared to 3d10 points of lightning damage from Call Lightning?
And my wording is probably far more confrontational than my intent, but really my biggest disagreement with the spell is that Clerics don't also have a decent healing spell to live out the Healer fantasy if that's what they wanted to focus on.
The thing with Healing Spirit is that while most of the healing spells before it were undertuned, it goes much too far in the other direction.
Healing Spirit is a bonus action to cast, and heals each friendly creature for 1d6 each turn it's able to enter the spirit's space, for 10 turns, and each packet is increased by 1d6 per spell level as it scales.
Compare to the previous 'good' bonus action heal, Healing Word: As a bonus action (and cast as a second-level spell for parity with Spirit), it heals 1 creature for 2d4+5 and scales by 1d4 per spell level.
Healing Word heals 1 guy for 10 HP. Healing Spirit heals the whole party for an average of 35 HP each. Each time you uplevel it, Word gets an extra 2.5 points of healing while Spirit gets another 35 per target. Granted you won't get full value out of Spirit in-combat, since not everyone will be able to get to it every turn, but even at 1/4 of its value it still more than doubles Word's healing on each of its multiple targets, at the same action and slot cost.
Your other point of comparison for out-of-combat healing is Prayer of Healing, which takes 10 minutes to cast and heals the whole party for 2d8+5 - an average of 14.
Spirit takes 1 minute to cycle through and, again, heals the whole party for 10d6 - an average of 35, nearly twice what Prayer does for the same slot in 1/10th the time. And if you scale it, Prayer gives everybody an additional 4.5 points of healing, while Spirit gives everybody an additional 35.
Prior to Healing Spirit, healing spells were undertuned and most of the non-bonus-action ones probably needed to heal ~50% more than they do to be attractive options. Instead of doing that, Healing Spirit came in healing for anywhere from twice as much to twenty times as much, with the best casting time, the best base healing, the most targets affected, and the best scaling of any healing spell of similar level.
And then we got several different slapdash 'fixes' from devs via Twitter, all of which reduced the amount of healing it does, but not by enough to stop it from still being two or three times more healing than all the other options.
"We've got one bonus action spell that heals one guy for 10, and another that heals everybody for 35 each? Well, I see the problem: that second spell should only heal multiple targets for an average of 35 total, divided more or less as you choose. Also, it should still scale fourteen times as well as the first one, since we reduced its baseline healing to be only three times better. There, I fixed it!"
I get that errors slip through and it's impossible to catch everything in playtesting, but jesus. Healing Spirit is not a small error, and the fixes were still fucked up like they didn't even bother to re-check their math. It's the equivalent of ordering a dozen loaves of bread and having the baker accidentally give you nearly three hundred loaves without noticing, and then, when you correct him, having him go "oh, my mistake. Sometimes small issues slip through the cracks, you know how it is. Here's your dozen loaves" before immediately handing you seventy fucking loaves again.
See this is where I disagree heavily. You're comparing how OP Healing Spirit is to other Healing Spells. But other Healing Spells suck. And I don't think it's an error. They may have stated in a tweet that it slipped through the cracks but they have a tendency to quickly react to players reacting as they did with the Ranger.
I'm comparing Healing Spirit to other spells that output damage and find that they can tend to even out. Out of combat, at level 3, Fireball does 8d6 damage to a potential room full of things and it's a burst, immediate up front amount of damage. How good Healing Spirit heals at level 3 (which is 2d6) over the course of 1 minute, assuming everyone got hit by that fireball and failed their saving throw, you are sacrificing up front, on demand Healing for healing over time which is how I personally see things should be balanced. Same with something like Call Lightning. It does less up front damage then fireball at 3d10 but if you hold the concentration, you can do it every round.
But that's just talking spells. Eldritch Blast/Heavy Crossbow/Longbow every round just way out damages anything that healing spirit can keep up with AND it uses a spell slot/resource where as the other things do not.
So really what it is, Damage has always been the king and healing has never been able to keep up in 5e. Now they FINALLY publish a spell for people who like to heal and people are calling it OP when comparing it to Healing spells, which it is, sure. But NOT when compared to damage out put vs the healing gained.
So if the Druid wants to use it out of combat to help the group, awesome! Keep the party moving! It doesn't affect anything. If they want to use it in combat where it's still actually pretty good, then AWESOME even more so as they are having to hold concentration which means giving up other concentration spells to do. Like we wildly disagree and when you use the words like calling it an error to even exist, it just sounds insulting to someone like myself because your words don't imply it as an "opinion" anymore.
A third level healing spirit outputs 20d6 healing to an entire group over one minute, and unlike damage spells like fireball there are no saves or resists - it just does. It vastly outdoes any damage spell in terms of efficiency
The designers have acknowledged that it is overpowered, and it isn't even satisfying to use because it doesn't heal in combat. It's, in my opinion, a misstep to simply offer an optional rule for the spell via twitter as opposed to throwing out an errata changing it to match, but w/e
Outside of that, I don't actually think healing really is a problem in 5e, I think it's only a problem if we're talking about every group being razor's edge optimized (and not having a life cleric), which they don't have to be
the amount of gnashing of teeth online I've seen about 5e's healing online vs in actual games is like night and day
Nah i generally find that when folks say x mechanic is designed baddly they just want to endlessly shit on the folks making the game they think they should be making. I find this especially true when they keep bitching about incompetent devs in the face of explanations of how the issue is dealt with.
Frankly I don't give a shit if someone thinks it's poorly designed, or even if it is poorly designed. That's really immaterial to actually playing and enjoying the game.
(this is one of the co-authors of Dungeon World btw)
I'm just wondering why the 5e thread has so many people who hate 5e hanging around in it to tell us that 5e is awful and sucks when none of us are designers that work for WOTC
What's the end goal? Are we supposed to admit that we're wrong for liking 5th edition? Or is it simply to shit on any enjoyment we have when we come to talk about a game we're playing or something?
I'm not talking about debating specific mechanics, like healing spirit, but in the last few pages there's a number of posts about 5e itself being bad
So some people have talked about the spell in passing but I wanted to shine a brighter spotlight on it.
I love Healing Spirit. And for the life of me I don't fully understand the cries for wanting it nerfed. I've seen people argue that "Healing Spirit is straight broken and needs to be house rules and nerfed away" while also saying "Healing spells in combat are a wasted spell slot". I know that Healing Spirit out of combat can pretty much get the party back up to full depending on the spell level used but ... I don't see why that's a bad thing? A character who wants to play a Healer type in this game ONLY has Healing Spirit to rely on as far as "bang for your buck". If used in combat (and it's a good spell so it's ACTUALLY worth using in combat too), it still has a chance of losing concentration. But for some reason, doing 2d6 in healing as a 3rd level spell is somehow busted compared to 3d10 points of lightning damage from Call Lightning?
And my wording is probably far more confrontational than my intent, but really my biggest disagreement with the spell is that Clerics don't also have a decent healing spell to live out the Healer fantasy if that's what they wanted to focus on.
The thing with Healing Spirit is that while most of the healing spells before it were undertuned, it goes much too far in the other direction.
Healing Spirit is a bonus action to cast, and heals each friendly creature for 1d6 each turn it's able to enter the spirit's space, for 10 turns, and each packet is increased by 1d6 per spell level as it scales.
Compare to the previous 'good' bonus action heal, Healing Word: As a bonus action (and cast as a second-level spell for parity with Spirit), it heals 1 creature for 2d4+5 and scales by 1d4 per spell level.
Healing Word heals 1 guy for 10 HP. Healing Spirit heals the whole party for an average of 35 HP each. Each time you uplevel it, Word gets an extra 2.5 points of healing while Spirit gets another 35 per target. Granted you won't get full value out of Spirit in-combat, since not everyone will be able to get to it every turn, but even at 1/4 of its value it still more than doubles Word's healing on each of its multiple targets, at the same action and slot cost.
Your other point of comparison for out-of-combat healing is Prayer of Healing, which takes 10 minutes to cast and heals the whole party for 2d8+5 - an average of 14.
Spirit takes 1 minute to cycle through and, again, heals the whole party for 10d6 - an average of 35, nearly twice what Prayer does for the same slot in 1/10th the time. And if you scale it, Prayer gives everybody an additional 4.5 points of healing, while Spirit gives everybody an additional 35.
Prior to Healing Spirit, healing spells were undertuned and most of the non-bonus-action ones probably needed to heal ~50% more than they do to be attractive options. Instead of doing that, Healing Spirit came in healing for anywhere from twice as much to twenty times as much, with the best casting time, the best base healing, the most targets affected, and the best scaling of any healing spell of similar level.
And then we got several different slapdash 'fixes' from devs via Twitter, all of which reduced the amount of healing it does, but not by enough to stop it from still being two or three times more healing than all the other options.
"We've got one bonus action spell that heals one guy for 10, and another that heals everybody for 35 each? Well, I see the problem: that second spell should only heal multiple targets for an average of 35 total, divided more or less as you choose. Also, it should still scale fourteen times as well as the first one, since we reduced its baseline healing to be only three times better. There, I fixed it!"
I get that errors slip through and it's impossible to catch everything in playtesting, but jesus. Healing Spirit is not a small error, and the fixes were still fucked up like they didn't even bother to re-check their math. It's the equivalent of ordering a dozen loaves of bread and having the baker accidentally give you nearly three hundred loaves without noticing, and then, when you correct him, having him go "oh, my mistake. Sometimes small issues slip through the cracks, you know how it is. Here's your dozen loaves" before immediately handing you seventy fucking loaves again.
See this is where I disagree heavily. You're comparing how OP Healing Spirit is to other Healing Spells. But other Healing Spells suck. And I don't think it's an error. They may have stated in a tweet that it slipped through the cracks but they have a tendency to quickly react to players reacting as they did with the Ranger.
I'm comparing Healing Spirit to other spells that output damage and find that they can tend to even out. Out of combat, at level 3, Fireball does 8d6 damage to a potential room full of things and it's a burst, immediate up front amount of damage. How good Healing Spirit heals at level 3 (which is 2d6) over the course of 1 minute, assuming everyone got hit by that fireball and failed their saving throw, you are sacrificing up front, on demand Healing for healing over time which is how I personally see things should be balanced. Same with something like Call Lightning. It does less up front damage then fireball at 3d10 but if you hold the concentration, you can do it every round.
But that's just talking spells. Eldritch Blast/Heavy Crossbow/Longbow every round just way out damages anything that healing spirit can keep up with AND it uses a spell slot/resource where as the other things do not.
So really what it is, Damage has always been the king and healing has never been able to keep up in 5e. Now they FINALLY publish a spell for people who like to heal and people are calling it OP when comparing it to Healing spells, which it is, sure. But NOT when compared to damage out put vs the healing gained.
This could be arguable, but A)if that was the rationale, then other healing spells released at the same time should have been similarly efficient, and they aren't; Life Transference is a 3rd level spell that damages you for 4d8 and heals someone else for 8d8 as an action - it's roughly on-curve for things like Cure Wounds and Healing Word, not part of an overhaul on the value of healing spells.
B)Other healing spells are undertuned, as I mentioned, but Healing Spirit hugely overshoots the mark. The solution to something being fairly underwhelming is not to make it twenty times as strong and see how that goes.
C)I'd agree that a healing spell needs to heal for more than a comparable damaging action to be competitive as an option, but you're cherry-picking your comparisons: longbow attacks every round may outdamage healing spirit (emphasis on may - it depends on how many different people you're healing each round) but doing so costs that person's action each round, as well, whereas Healing Spirit is ticking for free and only even cost a bonus action to begin with, allowing the caster to also be doing longbow attacks of their own or whatever.
And the Fireball comparison is even more telling - Fireball is one of the most effective damage spells in the game, and the developers have openly said it's intentionally above-curve compared to what a spell of its level 'should' be, and it's an AoE spell which theoretically lets it neutralize the advantage Healing Spirit has in affecting an arbitrary number of targets. Even so, that fireball is going to deal ~28 damage per target, and around half of those targets are going to save for half damage, leaving you with an actual per-target average closer to 21. Healing Spirit, at third level, is going to heal each target for an average of seventy - fully twice the damage the best damage spell deals, and closer to three times as much after you account for the save offered. Moreover, the problem gets even worse as you scale the spells: Not only does healing spirit double (or triple) the damage of fireball, but when you cast both at 4th level, Fireball's damage per target increases by 3.5 whereas Healing Spirit's healing per target increases by...35 again. Now you're comparing a damage spell that's dealing 32 damage to a healing spell that heals for over a hundred. 5th level? Fireball goes to 35 per target (with save for half!), Healing Spirit goes to 140 per target (no rolls required). And so on, the further you scale. And this is essentially your best-case scenario; almost any other damage spell is going to fare even worse in the comparison.
Healing spells should heal for more than an equal-level damage spell deals. They probably shouldn't be healing for three times as much as an equal-level damage spell, though.
So if the Druid wants to use it out of combat to help the group, awesome! Keep the party moving! It doesn't affect anything.
Listen, I don't know how much of the last couple pages you've read or how you feel about potions, but I would not try to tell these guys that easy access to arbitrarily high out-of-combat healing doesn't affect anything unless you've got a lot of time on your hands.
Edit: Hilariously, I fucked up my math here and described Fireball as dealing more damage than it actually does, unfairly tilting my analysis in Fireball's favor. Numbers corrected.
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joshgotroDeviled EggThe Land of REAL CHILIRegistered Userregular
The big thing I wish the dmg had was something like the 'adventure creation' charts in stars without number ( free PDF btw) it details how to build a quick setting, gives theme regions with built in conflicts and NPCs, and had random npc charts that detail motivations and stuff like that. All of which I will try to steal into 5e. Personally, as 5e is the first and only game I've dmd, the moment to moment gameplay I've done alright with, but the meta stuff is hard and poorly detailed. Things like, how to build an interesting encounter, how to create non combat encounters that don't derail the party, adventure structure, how to have NPCs react to the party without having the consequences feel like punishment, how to build an adventure that has many fail-safes, and how to structure things so that the players don't just speedrun through an adventure. And like an NPC chart with like 1k motivations to pull from
(this is one of the co-authors of Dungeon World btw)
I'm just wondering why the 5e thread has so many people who hate 5e hanging around in it to tell us that 5e is awful and sucks when none of us are designers that work for WOTC
What's the end goal? Are we supposed to admit that we're wrong for liking 5th edition? Or is it simply to shit on any enjoyment we have when we come to talk about a game we're playing or something?
I'm not talking about debating specific mechanics, like healing spirit, but in the last few pages there's a number of posts about 5e itself being bad
Nah i generally find that when folks say x mechanical is designed baddly they just want to endlessly shit on the folks making the game they think they should be making. I find this especially true when they keep bitching about incompetent devs in the face of explanations of how the issue is dealt with.
Frankly I don't give a shit if someone thinks it's poorly designed, or even if it is poorly designed. That's really immaterial to actually playing and enjoying the game.
I'd rather deal in solutions than critique.
Sleep, man, I get that you have a ton of experience. And honestly, I'm sure it would be fun to be at your table. You sound like you're invested in your players' enjoyment, that you design custom encounters and combats, and to a player, the struggle of the DM (or lack of struggle) is largely invisible.
But maybe, just maybe, this isn't a topic you can see clearly? That possibly you are too far removed from an inexperienced newbie DM to see what might be the sticking points they face when learning?
The irony to a lot of people addressing my posts are that they think I'm complaining that I'm not a good DM, or that my games aren't fun. My players love being at my table. We enjoy our games. Players leave my table wanting to run their own games, inspired by what happens.
They quickly figure out how much effort I had to put in to do what they experienced, and more often than not, they either give up the idea of running their own game, or take my advice and pick a different system to run.
DMing is hard. You need to be an actor, skilled in improv, be great at managing social expectations and dynamics, and also have a firm grasp of great story telling. You also need to be a system master for whatever game you need to run.
Why should you also have to design and build the actual game you're going to run, if you're expected to drop $$$ on official books and designs?
Like, it's true, all you need to *really* play "5E" are:
- Roll a d20 to resolve conflict, add relevant ability / proficiency modifiers
- Advantage / Disadvantage to simplify situational bonuses
- Class / Spell lists?
But why the hell should I fork over ~$150 for the basic 3 books, plus ~$50/ea for splat books.
Diagnosed with AML on 6/1/12. Read about it: www.effleukemia.com
(this is one of the co-authors of Dungeon World btw)
I'm just wondering why the 5e thread has so many people who hate 5e hanging around in it to tell us that 5e is awful and sucks when none of us are designers that work for WOTC
What's the end goal? Are we supposed to admit that we're wrong for liking 5th edition? Or is it simply to shit on any enjoyment we have when we come to talk about a game we're playing or something?
I'm not talking about debating specific mechanics, like healing spirit, but in the last few pages there's a number of posts about 5e itself being bad
Basically an evolution of the edition wars.
Whereas telling people that the problem they're having with a game is only because they're playing it wrong instead of being good at it like you is a conversational strategy which does not seem to have evolved at all!
(this is one of the co-authors of Dungeon World btw)
I'm just wondering why the 5e thread has so many people who hate 5e hanging around in it to tell us that 5e is awful and sucks when none of us are designers that work for WOTC
What's the end goal? Are we supposed to admit that we're wrong for liking 5th edition? Or is it simply to shit on any enjoyment we have when we come to talk about a game we're playing or something?
I'm not talking about debating specific mechanics, like healing spirit, but in the last few pages there's a number of posts about 5e itself being bad
Except every time we try to bring up a problem we're having with 5E, the response is generally "you're playing it wrong", which then devolves into a giant argument about who is playing what wrong or right.
Diagnosed with AML on 6/1/12. Read about it: www.effleukemia.com
So some people have talked about the spell in passing but I wanted to shine a brighter spotlight on it.
I love Healing Spirit. And for the life of me I don't fully understand the cries for wanting it nerfed. I've seen people argue that "Healing Spirit is straight broken and needs to be house rules and nerfed away" while also saying "Healing spells in combat are a wasted spell slot". I know that Healing Spirit out of combat can pretty much get the party back up to full depending on the spell level used but ... I don't see why that's a bad thing? A character who wants to play a Healer type in this game ONLY has Healing Spirit to rely on as far as "bang for your buck". If used in combat (and it's a good spell so it's ACTUALLY worth using in combat too), it still has a chance of losing concentration. But for some reason, doing 2d6 in healing as a 3rd level spell is somehow busted compared to 3d10 points of lightning damage from Call Lightning?
And my wording is probably far more confrontational than my intent, but really my biggest disagreement with the spell is that Clerics don't also have a decent healing spell to live out the Healer fantasy if that's what they wanted to focus on.
The thing with Healing Spirit is that while most of the healing spells before it were undertuned, it goes much too far in the other direction.
Healing Spirit is a bonus action to cast, and heals each friendly creature for 1d6 each turn it's able to enter the spirit's space, for 10 turns, and each packet is increased by 1d6 per spell level as it scales.
Compare to the previous 'good' bonus action heal, Healing Word: As a bonus action (and cast as a second-level spell for parity with Spirit), it heals 1 creature for 2d4+5 and scales by 1d4 per spell level.
Healing Word heals 1 guy for 10 HP. Healing Spirit heals the whole party for an average of 35 HP each. Each time you uplevel it, Word gets an extra 2.5 points of healing while Spirit gets another 35 per target. Granted you won't get full value out of Spirit in-combat, since not everyone will be able to get to it every turn, but even at 1/4 of its value it still more than doubles Word's healing on each of its multiple targets, at the same action and slot cost.
Your other point of comparison for out-of-combat healing is Prayer of Healing, which takes 10 minutes to cast and heals the whole party for 2d8+5 - an average of 14.
Spirit takes 1 minute to cycle through and, again, heals the whole party for 10d6 - an average of 35, nearly twice what Prayer does for the same slot in 1/10th the time. And if you scale it, Prayer gives everybody an additional 4.5 points of healing, while Spirit gives everybody an additional 35.
Prior to Healing Spirit, healing spells were undertuned and most of the non-bonus-action ones probably needed to heal ~50% more than they do to be attractive options. Instead of doing that, Healing Spirit came in healing for anywhere from twice as much to twenty times as much, with the best casting time, the best base healing, the most targets affected, and the best scaling of any healing spell of similar level.
And then we got several different slapdash 'fixes' from devs via Twitter, all of which reduced the amount of healing it does, but not by enough to stop it from still being two or three times more healing than all the other options.
"We've got one bonus action spell that heals one guy for 10, and another that heals everybody for 35 each? Well, I see the problem: that second spell should only heal multiple targets for an average of 35 total, divided more or less as you choose. Also, it should still scale fourteen times as well as the first one, since we reduced its baseline healing to be only three times better. There, I fixed it!"
I get that errors slip through and it's impossible to catch everything in playtesting, but jesus. Healing Spirit is not a small error, and the fixes were still fucked up like they didn't even bother to re-check their math. It's the equivalent of ordering a dozen loaves of bread and having the baker accidentally give you nearly three hundred loaves without noticing, and then, when you correct him, having him go "oh, my mistake. Sometimes small issues slip through the cracks, you know how it is. Here's your dozen loaves" before immediately handing you seventy fucking loaves again.
See this is where I disagree heavily. You're comparing how OP Healing Spirit is to other Healing Spells. But other Healing Spells suck. And I don't think it's an error. They may have stated in a tweet that it slipped through the cracks but they have a tendency to quickly react to players reacting as they did with the Ranger.
I'm comparing Healing Spirit to other spells that output damage and find that they can tend to even out. Out of combat, at level 3, Fireball does 8d6 damage to a potential room full of things and it's a burst, immediate up front amount of damage. How good Healing Spirit heals at level 3 (which is 2d6) over the course of 1 minute, assuming everyone got hit by that fireball and failed their saving throw, you are sacrificing up front, on demand Healing for healing over time which is how I personally see things should be balanced. Same with something like Call Lightning. It does less up front damage then fireball at 3d10 but if you hold the concentration, you can do it every round.
But that's just talking spells. Eldritch Blast/Heavy Crossbow/Longbow every round just way out damages anything that healing spirit can keep up with AND it uses a spell slot/resource where as the other things do not.
So really what it is, Damage has always been the king and healing has never been able to keep up in 5e. Now they FINALLY publish a spell for people who like to heal and people are calling it OP when comparing it to Healing spells, which it is, sure. But NOT when compared to damage out put vs the healing gained.
So if the Druid wants to use it out of combat to help the group, awesome! Keep the party moving! It doesn't affect anything. If they want to use it in combat where it's still actually pretty good, then AWESOME even more so as they are having to hold concentration which means giving up other concentration spells to do. Like we wildly disagree and when you use the words like calling it an error to even exist, it just sounds insulting to someone like myself because your words don't imply it as an "opinion" anymore.
A third level healing spirit outputs 20d6 healing to an entire group over one minute, and unlike damage spells like fireball there are no saves or resists - it just does. It vastly outdoes any damage spell in terms of efficiency
The designers have acknowledged that it is overpowered, and it isn't even satisfying to use because it doesn't heal in combat. It's, in my opinion, a misstep to simply offer an optional rule for the spell via twitter as opposed to throwing out an errata changing it to match, but w/e
Outside of that, I don't actually think healing really is a problem in 5e, I think it's only a problem if we're talking about every group being razor's edge optimized (and not having a life cleric), which they don't have to be
the amount of gnashing of teeth online I've seen about 5e's healing online vs in actual games is like night and day
They have actually never used these words. Maybe over performing but NOT over powered. They said they would keep an eye on it and he offered a quick, off the cuff remark due to everyone up in arms. Then he later comes along and outright says that they AREN'T changing the spell. Which means the designers looked at it and decided against it which has to mean something?
As for @Abbalah , my point of your comparison is that one is up front and direct, which surprise surprise has a MUCH bigger impact in a fight. What Healing Spirit does is just get people back down the path for taking a minute and a spell (and yes in the end it will heal for more than a damaging spell but it's literally over the course of an entire minute so the healing should outpace the damage of a direct applied affect in my mind). It doesn't actually impact combat and per Jeremy Crawford they don't design their encounters based on a party being lower on Hp and resources but rather always being healthy as they don't know when the party would fight said encounter. I guess I've always done the same thing but I will concede that a DM that isn't used to this might have a clear cut set of encounter beats in their head and thinking that "by the end of this dungeon level, the party should barely be holding on so I'll design it based on them having lower HP". So for these people it disrupts the flow.
I guess I'll just never agree with anyone that this spell is busted. And I never get to PLAY as a player. I'd love to, but it's not in the cards so I don't have some vested interest in seeing the spell preserved other than "Oh a healing spell that heals worth slotting, even IF just out of combat!".
As for the potion argument, I did indeed read it. I think my opinion is somewhere in the middle.
Do I think being able to buy 50 healing potions or whatever at a time breaks the game? Honestly, no I don't. I think mechanically it's fine. I just think when it comes to running the game that there aren't shops with an endless supply of such things, or likely even 50. They take awhile to make and 50 gold is a LOT to most people. But if I came up with a way where the party could legitimately drop 50 gold a pop for 2d4+2 healing? Sure, why not? It doesn't break my game.
(this is one of the co-authors of Dungeon World btw)
I'm just wondering why the 5e thread has so many people who hate 5e hanging around in it to tell us that 5e is awful and sucks when none of us are designers that work for WOTC
What's the end goal? Are we supposed to admit that we're wrong for liking 5th edition? Or is it simply to shit on any enjoyment we have when we come to talk about a game we're playing or something?
I'm not talking about debating specific mechanics, like healing spirit, but in the last few pages there's a number of posts about 5e itself being bad
Except every time we try to bring up a problem we're having with 5E, the response is generally "you're playing it wrong", which then devolves into a giant argument about who is playing what wrong or right.
Just paste in the raw url and automagic takes care of it.
Also I imagine that a professional game designer hearing that problems in professional game design are not really problems because folks can fix the problems themselves is infuriating. Sure, folks can fix things themselves or the professionals we hire to do it could be good at their job.
Edit: My read on Adam's point is a bit more aggressive than he is in that twitter thread but on the same general theme about understanding the design intent and what went wrong because that's how you get better.
I just really don't get the argument that the PHB has only (an arbitrarily high amount of) healing potions as a gold sink, when the same logic leads to any amount of elephants anywhere in the world.
And there are stats for them, too.
Healing Spirit is bad because it invalidates an entire class of spells, I'd argue (every other healing spell until this point). Prayer of Healing especially, considering that it's intended to be the "out-of-combat" option but Healing Spirit does far more in far less time? That makes no sense to me. Given that I've seen the others used (and used some myself) a decent amount in my own games, that seems like extraordinarily poor design.
Me elsewhere:
Steam, various fora: Ivellius
League of Legends: Doctor Ivellius
Twitch, probably another place or two I forget: LPIvellius
(this is one of the co-authors of Dungeon World btw)
I'm just wondering why the 5e thread has so many people who hate 5e hanging around in it to tell us that 5e is awful and sucks when none of us are designers that work for WOTC
What's the end goal? Are we supposed to admit that we're wrong for liking 5th edition? Or is it simply to shit on any enjoyment we have when we come to talk about a game we're playing or something?
I'm not talking about debating specific mechanics, like healing spirit, but in the last few pages there's a number of posts about 5e itself being bad
Because this is the D&D thread, and I love D&D, and I'd play a 5E game if one were available to me at the moment (though, at the moment, I'd probably prefer a different system).
Because I want to make life easier for people new to the hobby.
Because I like talking about DMing challenges people face.
Like, at no point have I shit on anyone for "enjoyment we have when we come to talk about a game we're playing." I love hearing stories of what people are doing and the adventures they're running.
But when someone posts about a problem they have with the rules - like CR - and someone's response is, "The rules are totally fine and work perfectly; when I use them, I ignore a lot and change a bunch in the following ways and kinda eyball this, that, and the other thing, but the rules are fine." Well, I don't see how that's helpful - especially when all of that is relying on years and years of knowledge of playing D&D, and the person asking is a newbie. Like, it should be okay to say, "Yeah - the ruleset has some problems. X, Y, and Z don't work so well. Here's some things I change to get what I want," but for some reason, people just seem incapable of that first step.
Or, like, in-combat healing being kinda weak and a suboptimal use of your turn a lot of the time. This is a thing that's true (queue the people telling me it's not but this has been a D&D issue for a long time). Now, some players are going to want to do in-combat healing because it's a major aspect of their character, in which case ... WOOHOO! Good for them! But wouldn't it be better if that was also a solid mechanical choice, too? Where in-combat healing could be just as instrumental in turning the tide of battle as, say, dropping a fireball or a hold person? Instead, we've got "Give up your entire turn; your ally gets back HP < a reasonably decent damage roll from an on-level monster."
Nah i generally find that when folks say x mechanical is designed baddly they just want to endlessly shit on the folks making the game they think they should be making. I find this especially true when they keep bitching about incompetent devs in the face of explanations of how the issue is dealt with.
Frankly I don't give a shit if someone thinks it's poorly designed, or even if it is poorly designed. That's really immaterial to actually playing and enjoying the game.
I'd rather deal in solutions than critique.
Sleep, man, I get that you have a ton of experience. And honestly, I'm sure it would be fun to be at your table. You sound like you're invested in your players' enjoyment, that you design custom encounters and combats, and to a player, the struggle of the DM (or lack of struggle) is largely invisible.
But maybe, just maybe, this isn't a topic you can see clearly? That possibly you are too far removed from an inexperienced newbie DM to see what might be the sticking points they face when learning?
The irony to a lot of people addressing my posts are that they think I'm complaining that I'm not a good DM, or that my games aren't fun. My players love being at my table. We enjoy our games. Players leave my table wanting to run their own games, inspired by what happens.
They quickly figure out how much effort I had to put in to do what they experienced, and more often than not, they either give up the idea of running their own game, or take my advice and pick a different system to run.
DMing is hard. You need to be an actor, skilled in improv, be great at managing social expectations and dynamics, and also have a firm grasp of great story telling. You also need to be a system master for whatever game you need to run.
Why should you also have to design and build the actual game you're going to run, if you're expected to drop $$$ on official books and designs?
Like, it's true, all you need to *really* play "5E" are:
- Roll a d20 to resolve conflict, add relevant ability / proficiency modifiers
- Advantage / Disadvantage to simplify situational bonuses
- Class / Spell lists?
But why the hell should I fork over ~$150 for the basic 3 books, plus ~$50/ea for splat books.
I'd think you'd only do that if you thought the game was fun enough to warrant it.
As far as the previous arguments of what people should spend money on and how the game doesn't go into details to help this out;
Could 5e use another splat book to help this out? Sure, maybe. Someone else did the kickstarter for it, however, and now they won't have to. For better or worse the game didn't put exact values on all that stuff and that's obviously going to be a "beauty in the eye of the beholder" type thing where no one is right or wrong, they're all just playing their game different. I also mean this for newer players/DMs too. Because the truth is they probably couldn't fit anymore in the book for something like that. I'm sure plenty of things got cut they would have rather kept and I doubt something like that would be on the top of their list. Now I'm not saying this is right or wrong as, again, this is perspective.
But even as a new player and eventual DM, it didn't really come up often the details of what people could spend their money on regularly. It just might not come up for some people ever. They use it to buy drinks, sleep at nicer inns, and sure, maybe buy magic items and stuff if the place allows. Maybe they pass it out to the village to help it thrive. Maybe they run a village. Or a city. And the details on how much that would cost would be super awesome to see! I know I'd be curious to see any recent numbers for that kind of thing. But there are also other areas in the game I'm just as if not more excited to see as well and it becomes one of those things where they are picking their favorite kid. They have limited runs on books on purpose so they don't over flood things. So what happens is what we have now where some things fall through the cracks.
5e isn't perfect in that it doesn't have everything spelled out in the books (though it has a lot more spelled out than people realize. The DMG gets ignored a lot. Not saying in these forums, just in general). Either it didn't think it needed to, or maybe it thought going too far down the rabbit hole in the details was a bad thing. To some people it is, to some it isn't. That's not a "flaw" of the game to everyone. It was a choice made that some see as flawed but others are happy with.
TLDR Sleep is right and so are you. The three books don't spell out every item it could and that's a bad thing. Also, the three books don't spell out every item it could and that's a good thing. The game was made as it was by design and that design obviously isn't for everyone. Nothing ever is. Some like the system enough to adapt. Others look for something better. And others still love the system as it is without having/wanting to adapt as they see it runs great as is. But expressing your displeasure with a part of the system is ALSO a good thing. It gives devs something to think about if they ever happen upon it. Maybe they'll disagree and do nothing but sometimes it will lead to something. So having discourse is great! Obviously people will have counter opinions and that's great too so long as none of it's mean spirited.
what has rankled some feathers is some individuals in the discussion are content to just slam their fist on the table and shout "I AM UNHAPPY" which is tiresome after 4-5 pages; anytime someone asks for their idea for solution, they get a begrudging, condescending text wall laced with "but I shouldn't have to do this because ugh" and it relights the whole fire
hell, I've seen some good ideas sprinkled in here in between the merry go round of "yeah huh" "nuh uh"
i mean, if the goal is to admit the game has problems out of the box, then sure, EVERY game has issues... I just think that those of us who have played for a long time would rather just plug the holes we find and move on to playing the game we want to play like we always have
where do we go from there? like, to pick on @JustTee for a moment, your entire tone has been "well I'm new and I have all these problems" and then you have usually followed with "and I shouldn't have to fix these myself harumph"
the whole thing just funnels back into a combative argument on both sides
the new DMs in the audience, what ARE your pain points, and are you willing to do a little hackery to plug those holes for your game? that's a discussion worth having in my mind.
I just really don't get the argument that the PHB has only (an arbitrarily high amount of) healing potions as a gold sink, when the same logic leads to any amount of elephants anywhere in the world.
And there are stats for them, too.
Healing Spirit is bad because it invalidates an entire class of spells, I'd argue (every other healing spell until this point). Prayer of Healing especially, considering that it's intended to be the "out-of-combat" option but Healing Spirit does far more in far less time? That makes no sense to me. Given that I've seen the others used (and used some myself) a decent amount in my own games, that seems like extraordinarily poor design.
I guess that's why I'll never get this stance as Prayer of Healing ... sucks. Heck the entire class of spells mostly suck which is why people get all armchair about "don't use healing spells in combat and only ever out of combat when it's necessary as it's a waste of a spell slot". Even Bards and Wizards get a better Prayer of Healing in Catnap which has the added benefit of getting Short Rest Classes back at full power. In the same amount of time as Prayer of Healing. I've seen Prayer of Healing once and the Cleric unlearned it the next day and I too felt it was underwhelming but whatever. I figured maybe if they were a life cleric it might have picked up a bit? But that's just personal experience as was yours so it's hardly telling.
So I guess maybe I do agree with you. Healing Spirit does make most of the other healing spells look like garbage (excluding Heal, Regenerate, and Healing Word as they each have their own unique qualities). My thing is just that they ARE way underpowered and it points it out. And I know it's said that it goes too far in the other direction, which is where the views part ways.
But when someone posts about a problem they have with the rules - like CR - and someone's response is, "The rules are totally fine and work perfectly; when I use them, I ignore a lot and change a bunch in the following ways and kinda eyball this, that, and the other thing, but the rules are fine." Well, I don't see how that's helpful - especially when all of that is relying on years and years of knowledge of playing D&D, and the person asking is a newbie.
I just want to expand on this a bit.
I am not what I would consider an amazing DM; I'm, at best, "pretty good."
However, I've run entire adventures for tables of 5-7 players where I had no prepared stats at all for any of the enemies they encountered. I was able to do it completely off-the-cuff, because 1) I knew the rules of the system I was using (hacked 3.5ish) forwards and backwards, 2) I knew my players and their characters well, and 3) I'd been doing this for long enough that I knew that, e.g., a 1st-level badguy should have an AC of 12-16 and 6, 10, or 20 HP depending on how tanky I wanted it to be, and saves of -1 to +4; sprinkle in some abilities (on death, spawn 1d4 baby centipedes; +1 fire damage; spit a 4-square line of 1d4 acid; stands up on its turn with 1 HP as long as the Shaman is dancing; etc.) and you can get some super varied, fun combats.
But, like, I would never recommend that method to a new DM. A new DM should have a system in place that helps them get similar results - varied, fun combats - without the need for eyeballing things and making lots of guesses.
And D&D had that! Well, sorta - it took a few iterations, but the 4E rules, late in life, were pretty good for that sort of thing. The 5E CR system is a definite step backwards from that, and I can't for the life of me understand why they did it. It's just so much less useful than it used to be.
what has rankled some feathers is some individuals in the discussion are content to just slam their fist on the table and shout "I AM UNHAPPY" which is tiresome after 4-5 pages; anytime someone asks for their idea for solution, they get a begrudging, condescending text wall laced with "but I shouldn't have to do this because ugh" and it relights the whole fire
hell, I've seen some good ideas sprinkled in here in between the merry go round of "yeah huh" "nuh uh"
i mean, if the goal is to admit the game has problems out of the box, then sure, EVERY game has issues... I just think that those of us who have played for a long time would rather just plug the holes we find and move on to playing the game we want to play like we always have
where do we go from there? like, to pick on @JustTee for a moment, your entire tone has been "well I'm new and I have all these problems" and then you have usually followed with "and I shouldn't have to fix these myself harumph"
the whole thing just funnels back into a combative argument on both sides
the new DMs in the audience, what ARE your pain points, and are you willing to do a little hackery to plug those holes for your game? that's a discussion worth having in my mind.
Except, several people (myself included) have in fact detailed where our pain points are, and we get told "no you're wrong those aren't pain points because you just have to make it up wholecloth, you see? So easy."
We've also said how and why we've changed things, but again, get told "nah everythings fine, you just do this thing that isn't spelled out to you at all in any of the books". Like, look just a few posts above you:
Because this is the D&D thread, and I love D&D, and I'd play a 5E game if one were available to me at the moment (though, at the moment, I'd probably prefer a different system).
Because I want to make life easier for people new to the hobby.
Because I like talking about DMing challenges people face.
Like, at no point have I shit on anyone for "enjoyment we have when we come to talk about a game we're playing." I love hearing stories of what people are doing and the adventures they're running.
But when someone posts about a problem they have with the rules - like CR - and someone's response is, "The rules are totally fine and work perfectly; when I use them, I ignore a lot and change a bunch in the following ways and kinda eyball this, that, and the other thing, but the rules are fine." Well, I don't see how that's helpful - especially when all of that is relying on years and years of knowledge of playing D&D, and the person asking is a newbie. Like, it should be okay to say, "Yeah - the ruleset has some problems. X, Y, and Z don't work so well. Here's some things I change to get what I want," but for some reason, people just seem incapable of that first step.
Or, like, in-combat healing being kinda weak and a suboptimal use of your turn a lot of the time. This is a thing that's true (queue the people telling me it's not but this has been a D&D issue for a long time). Now, some players are going to want to do in-combat healing because it's a major aspect of their character, in which case ... WOOHOO! Good for them! But wouldn't it be better if that was also a solid mechanical choice, too? Where in-combat healing could be just as instrumental in turning the tide of battle as, say, dropping a fireball or a hold person? Instead, we've got "Give up your entire turn; your ally gets back HP < a reasonably decent damage roll from an on-level monster."
My pain points with DMing 5E:
1 - Building satisfactory encounters is something that is incredibly difficult, potentially time consuming, and uses a ton of things that just isn't usefully spelled out anywhere. There are pages and pages of text in the DMG detailing how to build combat encounters, and how to use the math to determine how difficult it would be for a given party of a given number of players at a given level.
It is widely regarded as a baseline at best, wildly useless at worst.
When that's pointed out, rather than being given some help at adjusting CR / encounters, we're told "nah encounter building is fine I just eyeball everything read every stat block and mentally adjust and calculate how that might affect my party and also throw in terrain".
2 - The base incentive system for players using their powers and spells leads them wanting to try to game long rests, or leaves portions of the party feeling useless if they use all their long rest resources in the first fight of the morning. See above for why some players might be forced to use more powers than intended for fights, as the difficulties can be hard to judge when designing the encounters.
Oh, also, for some reason, some classes are incentivized to try to rest in short 1 hour periods, and others don't get anything until long rests.
Oh, also, the game design specifically calls out adventure days, how many fights a party should face before resting, etc etc etc. I don't know a single person who *actually* uses those numbers and doesn't end up tearing their hair out.
3 - A lot of teaching new players 5E results in my explanation being "for reasons".
Why do dwarves and basically only dwarves move 25 feet per round? Why do spells list their ranges extremely specifically, but combats rarely (if ever) happen further than 60 feet apart? Why are so many things labeled "levels"? Why are spells organized so weirdly in the PHB? Why do equipment charts have so many different items that are basically not at all different except for cost? Why are so many pieces of equipment so specifically detailed when there isn't really anything different between them?
4 - Basically everything @Abbalah said in the first post on this page:
They're less prepared for "How can I tell if this combat is too hard/too easy?", "What loot should players be getting?", "How often should they be resting and how do I fix it if they're resting too often?", "What do this monster's spells do?", "How do I keep combats interesting?", "What's the right DC for this check?", "How do I deal with this player who keeps summoning a bunch of fucking wolves?", "This player wants to buy a +1 sword; how does that work?", and so on.
5 - Oh, I forgot, my player's main pain point - that on any given turn, there is an extremely obvious "optimal" choice, and unless there are other things in the fight going on, combats tend to feel pretty boring. Because mechanically, each class is fairly limited in what it can do. And often times, with new players at least, being presented with the idea that "you can do anything" often means "holy shit I have no idea what to do I guess I'll just swing my sword at the thing".
The solution to making D&D 5E combat interesting, it turns out, is to not run D&D 5E combat as presented by the pages and pages of rules. Because most of those rules end up distilled as "I hit the monster with my Weapon/Spell as hard as I can". Instead, you have to provide context, environments, and space for player improv. Which again, adds to the challenge of balancing the mechanics, because, surprise surprise, I am not a professional game designer. And if the solution to "how to make 5E combat interesting" is "Don't use 5E combat as written, instead use your narrative to make the boring mechanics less boring" I would probably suggest that the mechanics kind of suck.
As for solutions:
Honestly late-stage 4E sounds like it's pretty sweet. Unfortunately, I have no idea what books I'd actually have to get in order to get an understanding together of what that means. Also, my players don't want to deal with all the extra stuff of 4E (floating modifiers, excess math), but would probably love to have the extra combat abilities, and tighter balancing between <fully rested> state and <exhausted> state. So I've mostly tried to hack 5E with bits and pieces from Dungeon World (for running interesting combats), Stars Without Number (for GM-side prep), and Spellbound Kingdom (for player based mechanical options).
JustTee on
Diagnosed with AML on 6/1/12. Read about it: www.effleukemia.com
I'd just like to assert that between (a) wanting to criticize something academically for the purposes of discussing and understanding it and (b) taking a solutions oriented approach with explicit purpose to fix observed issues, neither of those two stances is wrong or even inherently better.
It is both okay to seek and offer solutions AND to discuss perceived shortcomings of the game for the purpose of gaining a deeper understanding of those shortcomings without any intention of solving a problem.
In my experience in-combat healing IS a valuable mechanical choice.
So I guess that's where my ultimate disconnect with the conversation lies.
I've been in tons of combats as both a player and DM where a well-timed cure wounds has kept a party wipe from
happening.
Now, maybe they should be buffed. I can understand examining how those spells are balanced.
The problem you run into is that a common use case for in-combat healing with 'a well-timed cure wounds' looks a little like this:
->Monster with 11 HP remaining attacks a player for 9 damage, bringing them down to 10 HP
->Cleric who could cast Inflict Wounds for 3d10 damage, very likely killing the monster, instead spends turn casting Cure Wounds for 7, putting teammate back at 17
->Healed player attacks monster, misses
->Monster goes again, hits same player for 9 damage again. Player is now at 8 HP, but the cleric has one less spell slot.
The metaphor is a sinking canoe: Incoming damage is the water that's filling your boat. Healing is bailing the water out with a bucket. Killing the monster fixes the hole in the bottom so the water stops getting in. The efficient solution is to stop the water from getting in as quickly as possible, then bail out the water that got in before you could close it - otherwise you just end up with more water to move.
Doubly so once you recognize that you only get to use the bucket four times a day, and if you spend them all on bailing water out while there's still a hole in your boat, you'll just find yourself in a boat full of water with no bucket.
what has rankled some feathers is some individuals in the discussion are content to just slam their fist on the table and shout "I AM UNHAPPY" which is tiresome after 4-5 pages; anytime someone asks for their idea for solution, they get a begrudging, condescending text wall laced with "but I shouldn't have to do this because ugh" and it relights the whole fire
hell, I've seen some good ideas sprinkled in here in between the merry go round of "yeah huh" "nuh uh"
i mean, if the goal is to admit the game has problems out of the box, then sure, EVERY game has issues... I just think that those of us who have played for a long time would rather just plug the holes we find and move on to playing the game we want to play like we always have
where do we go from there?
Well, we have to get there first, right? It's pretty hard to provide solutions to problems we can't even agree are problems, and that would be a weird expectation to have.
The bar for being constructive can't be 'you provided a solution, and then, after that, you convinced people that there was a problem that needed solving'.
If every problem, complaint, or simple observation about the game is stonewalled with "that's not true, you're just playing it wrong, you should practice more, the rules aren't important, nothing is real, everything is optional, just make it up" the person describing the problem is not the one preventing things from moving forward constructively.
It feels to me like the "point" of healing in 5e is not to attempt to outheal something that is dealing damage, however if you can strategically keep your wizard conscious until the next round they can get another fireball off, or maybe they can disengage and get out of range and not get downed at all. The other primary "optimal" use of healing is to trade spell slots for some person's health outside of combat so that they can keep the rest of you from dying for a round or two while the enemies get wrecked, in my opinion. In case 1 healing spirit is good but unfun, as it takes both a druid and ranger's concentration options away, in case 2 it invalidates every other spell in the game that does the same thing - which I think is the issue with it
It requires a lot of homebrewing the healing spells to actually be competitive at actually outhealing damage, at least until higher levels when the likes of Heal and later Mass Heal come into play - that's why I don't think it's the intent
Clerics, Druids, and Bards each get an additional class feature called Healing Power. This class feature grants a spell that doesn't need to be prepared and doesn't use up spell slots, but can only be cast a number of times per short rest equal to your proficiency bonus. As a bonus action, the spell heals the target for roughly equal to what you'd get out of an average Hit Die, say 1d8+spellcasting modifier.
Boom. Useful healing that is a reliable resource, and it doesn't get in the way of doing other cool things on the healer's turn.
That's one way to do it, I've played with re-adding the proficiency bonus *for each spell level* to direct heals, and making cure wounds a bonus action or a full action if cast at 30 feet, so an 18 wis third level cure wounds would heal for 3d8+12
What I've found from doing that is that combat ends up being more of a slog, and classes with healing slots end up being healbots as healing is less a strategic choice to keep an ally up at a clutch moment and more just a game of fluctuating health bars
It depends on the table, but it certainly didn't feel unbalanced to just keep adding the casting modifier with each level - the party didn't feel any more or less powerful in the scheme of things, healing spells just ended up being used more and things like hold person and darkness and hypnotic pattern got used less. Now if you have any players who WANT to be dedicated healers, and want to feel powerful in doing so but don't want to play a life cleric, something like that is a great idea with no downsides whatsoever
My pain points with DMing 5E:
1 - Building satisfactory encounters is something that is incredibly difficult, potentially time consuming, and uses a ton of things that just isn't usefully spelled out anywhere. There are pages and pages of text in the DMG detailing how to build combat encounters, and how to use the math to determine how difficult it would be for a given party of a given number of players at a given level.
It is widely regarded as a baseline at best, wildly useless at worst.
When that's pointed out, rather than being given some help at adjusting CR / encounters, we're told "nah encounter building is fine I just eyeball everything read every stat block and mentally adjust and calculate how that might affect my party and also throw in terrain".
I apply the recommendations (CR 1 monster = full party of level 1 PCs) for a basic start as an 'average' encounter. I was having a bit of trouble myself until it was pointed out explicitly that number of actions provides a big advantage, and so I use average CR as a guesstimate
in practice, I still end up adjusting monster HP totals during a combat just to fine tweak. beyond that, I also try to program in ways to avoid / get out of a given battle too, so there's that, but I think the response you're going to give me is that's a sidestep, so unfortunately my answer is time and experience for feeling out your group and if they're struggling, offer them ways out when they get in over their head
2 - The base incentive system for players using their powers and spells leads them wanting to try to game long rests, or leaves portions of the party feeling useless if they use all their long rest resources in the first fight of the morning. See above for why some players might be forced to use more powers than intended for fights, as the difficulties can be hard to judge when designing the encounters.
Oh, also, for some reason, some classes are incentivized to try to rest in short 1 hour periods, and others don't get anything until long rests.
Oh, also, the game design specifically calls out adventure days, how many fights a party should face before resting, etc etc etc. I don't know a single person who *actually* uses those numbers and doesn't end up tearing their hair out.
this is fair; I've never run across parties who sleep all the time, but if I were to combat that it would be putting them in the hotseat with time-critical objectives
I'm also a fan of Colville's tactic of hitting them with encounters during the rest period; that's probably the easiest one to do. if they have the option to go back to town and do it though, there's probably not much you can do there but roll with the punches
as for the different resting incentives, a rule I used back when Saga Edition came out for d20 (the last Star Wars d20 that was a big experiment bed for what would become DnD4) is let all daily / long rest resources go to per encounter. in this case, it would probably be short rest. this will if you apply it unilaterally make some classes incredibly strong so that's an idea I'd probably only apply if I was comfortable with the power spike
3 - A lot of teaching new players 5E results in my explanation being "for reasons".
Why do dwarves and basically only dwarves move 25 feet per round? Why do spells list their ranges extremely specifically, but combats rarely (if ever) happen further than 60 feet apart? Why are so many things labeled "levels"? Why are spells organized so weirdly in the PHB? Why do equipment charts have so many different items that are basically not at all different except for cost? Why are so many pieces of equipment so specifically detailed when there isn't really anything different between them?
dwarves - D&D/fantasy baggage from the wargaming roots. included to appeal to grognards
spell ranges - same thing
levels - I dunno what you mean by this, elaborate?
organization - no idea
items - wargaming baggage again; historically old editions loved to detail out every permutation of every weapon
4 - Basically everything Abbalah said in the first post on this page:
They're less prepared for "How can I tell if this combat is too hard/too easy?", "What loot should players be getting?", "How often should they be resting and how do I fix it if they're resting too often?", "What do this monster's spells do?", "How do I keep combats interesting?", "What's the right DC for this check?", "How do I deal with this player who keeps summoning a bunch of fucking wolves?", "This player wants to buy a +1 sword; how does that work?", and so on.
Too hard/too easy: put your players in it. if it's too easy, let them knock the bowling pins down. if it's too hard, look at why (maybe your players are rolling like ass, maybe the monsters are exploiting a weakness in your party) and either A: let them deal with the consequences or B: chop some health off some of the non-named monsters and tilt the numbers back in their favor. if you go with option A, have the monsters sell unconscious heroes back to your party for some money (hey look a gold sink!) (thank you Matt Colville for this one)
Loot: my preference is ask what your players plan to go for and a couple wishlist items. in the early-to-midgame, give them items that are maybe not exactly what they asked for, but fill a niche (example, if the wizard wants a fireball wand, give him a wand of magic missile instead). in the late game, let them make the items (if you want to) or have them follow up specific leads to that item, since they're probably aiming at very rare/artifact level gear.
alternatively, let your players go on a trek to a place where they might be able to buy and/or commission the items of their dreams
Rests: if they rest too much out in the woods, wandering monsters. if they don't rest... break some bones? you could up the "lethality" of the game by introducing a simple debility system a la dungeon world that represents long-term injuries. Saga edition did something kinda like this with a "Condition Track", details here on that
Monster spells: i make judicious amounts of spell cards, and when i write down a statblock for use i leave off most of the shit WOTC seems to feel is essential to the monster like its senses and super detailed explanations of its attacks
example: my party fought some animated armors. I wrote out on an index card AC 18, HP 33, spd 25, 2 attacks longsword +4 1d10+2. if anything else is needed I have the block linked directly from my onenote (which as an aside onenote on mobile is REALLY good)
if i had a spell on there it'd be like, Fireball - 8d6 dex half
Interesting Combats: hoo boy, this is a long one. I've had the most success thus far when I include something interesting about the terrain, whether that be patches of difficult terrain (maybe it's avoidable via checks, maybe it's just there like deep water) and negative effects (Lair actions!) that occur outside of the "monsters"
in my big arc-ending boss fight, the players ended up fighting a giant plague mushroom that had started to assimilate a dryad. they fought some cordyceps goblins as fodder (think The Last of Us zombies), as well as a pair of sludge elementals, which was all taking place in a giant grotto with a small island in the middle (where the mushroom was) and hip-deep water surrounding it
the mushroom didn't really do anything except summon little mushroom grenades that would float up from under the water and explode with poisonous spores
it also had a recharge ability to summon more sludge elementals
the dryad was flinging some spells around while this was happening and it was a very tense/fun encounter (which they managed to defeat and even save the dryad but that's another story)
DC for the check: I think this is easier to eyeball in 5e than it was previous because of the bounded mechanics. in 3/4 they encouraged you to scale stuff up or down but honestly you just need to know the class archetypes and what saves they're strong at, and set the DCs accordingly. 10 is basic, 15 is moderate, 20 is hard, and then play around in those ranges to taste. if the effect is really punishing, maybe lower the DC, or maybe you raise it to make the tension go up
I'm also a fan of adopting a dungeon world move here and "telling the consequences and asking" (look up GM moves in DW if you haven't, it's a good read). there's been a few times where a player has asked to do something dangerous and I tell them what will happen up front on a success/failure so they can decide how to proceed
The Wolf Whisperer: hmm. social consequences? maybe he builds a reputation as the Wolf Mage? start throwing fireballs at the entire pack? start using their own tactics against them but maybe one step higher? can't imagine a bunch of worgs would be fun to fight against, but you could definitely narrate a cool wolfwizard and his pack vs. the orcs and the worgs battle
how do I buy a +1 sword?: you have to answer the question as a DM if that's something they can do or can't do. if they can, tell them honestly. "Well, in character, you don't know, but your character has heard of [Faction] in [City] that specializes in the acquisition of potent enchanted items" or "The High Wizard Cliff Magicbottom has been known to work off commission"
I don't think there's a right or wrong way, PHB and DMG be damned--do what makes sense for your game. if you haven't considered that, then do so now, and answer the player honestly.
5 - Oh, I forgot, my player's main pain point - that on any given turn, there is an extremely obvious "optimal" choice, and unless there are other things in the fight going on, combats tend to feel pretty boring. Because mechanically, each class is fairly limited in what it can do. And often times, with new players at least, being presented with the idea that "you can do anything" often means "holy shit I have no idea what to do I guess I'll just swing my sword at the thing".
The solution to making D&D 5E combat interesting, it turns out, is to not run D&D 5E combat as presented by the pages and pages of rules. Because most of those rules end up distilled as "I hit the monster with my Weapon/Spell as hard as I can". Instead, you have to provide context, environments, and space for player improv. Which again, adds to the challenge of balancing the mechanics, because, surprise surprise, I am not a professional game designer. And if the solution to "how to make 5E combat interesting" is "Don't use 5E combat as written, instead use your narrative to make the boring mechanics less boring" I would probably suggest that the mechanics kind of suck.
this is a mentality thing--if you want to inspire your players to do feats of derring-do, you have to show them those feats of derring-do are worth derring-doing
in my last session the Monk attempted to tackle an animated armor out of a hole in the wall on the second floor of a tower, which entailed a 30 foot drop (and would have definitely taken the armor out of the fight, if only temporarily)
he rolled his strength, I adjudicated with disadvantage due to him being a smol boi vs a large heavy construct, and he rolled a 1; he pushed the armor but he pushed with it and ended up having to grasp on the ledge with a well-timed acrobatics and then climbed back up with some movement
the group very much enjoyed this
As for solutions:
Honestly late-stage 4E sounds like it's pretty sweet. Unfortunately, I have no idea what books I'd actually have to get in order to get an understanding together of what that means. Also, my players don't want to deal with all the extra stuff of 4E (floating modifiers, excess math), but would probably love to have the extra combat abilities, and tighter balancing between <fully rested> state and <exhausted> state. So I've mostly tried to hack 5E with bits and pieces from Dungeon World (for running interesting combats), Stars Without Number (for GM-side prep), and Spellbound Kingdom (for player based mechanical options).
try out 13th age, freely available in SRD form here. i haven't played it, but many folk here have, and it works off 4e's assumptions.
EDIT: if anyone wants to get better at running games in general, apocalypse engine games have great GM advice, and Dungeon World in particular is an analog. there's also an amazing guide here that talks about the ethos of DW and how to run it in detail that I think overlaps with 5e in very critical ways for maximum fun enhancement
(this is one of the co-authors of Dungeon World btw)
I'm just wondering why the 5e thread has so many people who hate 5e hanging around in it to tell us that 5e is awful and sucks when none of us are designers that work for WOTC
What's the end goal? Are we supposed to admit that we're wrong for liking 5th edition? Or is it simply to shit on any enjoyment we have when we come to talk about a game we're playing or something?
I'm not talking about debating specific mechanics, like healing spirit, but in the last few pages there's a number of posts about 5e itself being bad
Except every time we try to bring up a problem we're having with 5E, the response is generally "you're playing it wrong", which then devolves into a giant argument about who is playing what wrong or right.
The problem is that, this problem you are having isn't actually in 5e.
For instance, if i told you "the problem i have with 3.5 is that it doesn't have enough splat books in order to let players make interesting and unique characters." you would be right to suggest that this is incorrect; 3.5 had shit tonnes of splat and one of the common problems is that there is too much.
"healing spells are undertuned because you can just buy infinite healing potions" -> No actually you cannot buy infinite healing potions that is not in 5e. You have to modify the base rules of 5e to have that be a rule and even though WoTC has officially done that for one of its official systems that does not make it "the rule" for 5e. And even if you do let people buy lots of healing potions actual people playing the game don't tend to use them like that. And even if they do, out of combat healing isn't the biggest deal.
That being said, I don't like healing spirit. Its probably overtuned in terms of HP/spell slot when you rank it up. But its also not a combat spell and its main weakness is that when over-casting it you attain too much value. Prayer of Healing has similar value to healing spirit (2d8+3-5 per person) = 52 HP for a party of 4 at 4 Spellcasting mod. But you only gain 4.5 HP/person (18) per spell level while you attain 35 HP per spell level of healing spirit and, because the spell is more granular its harder to waste HP.
In terms of in combat spot healing i don't think HS is that strong. 1d6/lvl/round is weak for a concentration spell. Combats rarely last more than 3 rounds anyway and while its bonus action casting time seems great you're unlikely to have a powerful oomph to do anyway because you're a druid or a ranger(druids need concentration most of their powerful attack spells and you cannot cast this and another powerful spell at the same time due to bonus action casting restrictions) rangers tend to like to use their bonus actions and also don't get many spells).
There is some bard/cleric cheese you could do in order to make it kinda hilarious but probably not worse than any of the other things bards can do and losing a top end level would matter.
That's one way to do it, I've played with re-adding the proficiency bonus *for each spell level* to direct heals, and making cure wounds a bonus action or a full action if cast at 30 feet, so an 18 wis third level cure wounds would heal for 3d8+12
What I've found from doing that is that combat ends up being more of a slog, and classes with healing slots end up being healbots as healing is less a strategic choice to keep an ally up at a clutch moment and more just a game of fluctuating health bars
It depends on the table, but it certainly didn't feel unbalanced to just keep adding the casting modifier with each level - the party didn't feel any more or less powerful in the scheme of things, healing spells just ended up being used more and things like hold person and darkness and hypnotic pattern got used less. Now if you have any players who WANT to be dedicated healers, and want to feel powerful in doing so but don't want to play a life cleric, something like that is a great idea with no downsides whatsoever
It's pretty much what I ended up adopting as well as I do have players that LOVE using their spells to heal instead of crowd control or damaging. They play healers in most medias available to them and D&D was lacking in that for them and probably where the disconnect is from myself and others. Others see healing as something that they want to keep being low impact for their own reasons. Where as I have at least 2 players in the group that love the Healer Fantasy and had a hard time until Healing Spirit came around as something official that was just NEAT. Cure Wounds I did exactly what you already suggested where applying the modifier for every healing dice is fine by me and didn't break anything.
->Monster with 11 HP remaining attacks a player for 9 damage, bringing them down to 10 HP
->Cleric who could cast Inflict Wounds for 3d10 damage, very likely killing the monster, instead spends turn casting Cure Wounds for 7, putting teammate back at 17
->Healed player attacks monster, misses
->Monster goes again, hits same player for 9 damage again. Player is now at 8 HP, but the cleric has one less spell slot.
The metaphor is a sinking canoe: Incoming damage is the water that's filling your boat. Healing is bailing the water out with a bucket. Killing the monster fixes the hole in the bottom so the water stops getting in. The efficient solution is to stop the water from getting in as quickly as possible, then bail out the water that got in before you could close it - otherwise you just end up with more water to move.
Cleric who could cast inflict for 3d10 does so and misses.
Now we're at Monster with 11 HP and player at 10 and its the players turn.
But yes, cure wounds is better spent out of combat we have discussed this. It doesn't make the spell bad it makes the spell different in value.
Even Bards and Wizards get a better Prayer of Healing in Catnap which has the added benefit of getting Short Rest Classes back at full power.
If out of combat healing is an issue then catnap is 100% not better than prayer of healing
Catnap lets players take short rests 50 minutes faster 1/day but doesn't provide any margin on actual HP/day/slot. IME its rare that you can rest for 10 minutes but not an hour.
it's so hard to come up with rules for making a balanced encounter is that one group of players might be like Chris Perkins "The Waffle Crew" where they don't even have the right number of spells picked and have their attack bonus down wrong and aren't sure what their spells do and the other group might be all crossbow fighters with sharpshooter who deal 60 damage per round each at level 3
I guess they could make 5e more simple, other than that I'm not sure of how to come up with solid guidelines without exception for encounter difficulty
what has rankled some feathers is some individuals in the discussion are content to just slam their fist on the table and shout "I AM UNHAPPY" which is tiresome after 4-5 pages; anytime someone asks for their idea for solution, they get a begrudging, condescending text wall laced with "but I shouldn't have to do this because ugh" and it relights the whole fire
hell, I've seen some good ideas sprinkled in here in between the merry go round of "yeah huh" "nuh uh"
i mean, if the goal is to admit the game has problems out of the box, then sure, EVERY game has issues... I just think that those of us who have played for a long time would rather just plug the holes we find and move on to playing the game we want to play like we always have
where do we go from there? like, to pick on @JustTee for a moment, your entire tone has been "well I'm new and I have all these problems" and then you have usually followed with "and I shouldn't have to fix these myself harumph"
To pick on the other side, what I usually hear from the other side is "no the game is fine, it's you who is the problem", which blows, and naturally invites the combative attitude. I have heard much less of "oh, yeah, the game is weird about money", or "yes, CR is a tricky thing to figure out, here is how i did it" and much more of "um, actually in my games that's totally fine and it's your job to make it fine. Why aren't you oding your job?"
If people pointing out pain points results in being told they aren't actually pain points and we're bad DMs for thinking they are, then what do you expect will be the response?
the whole thing just funnels back into a combative argument on both sides
the new DMs in the audience, what ARE your pain points, and are you willing to do a little hackery to plug those holes for your game? that's a discussion worth having in my mind.
My pain points are that the book tries to have it every possible way and ends up being a terrible way to introduce people to the hobby. From the opening two paragraphs of the DMG:
Whether you're running a D&D game already or you think it's something you want to try, this book is for you.
The Dungeon Master's Guide assumes you know the basics of how to play the D&D tabletop roleplaying game.
So, if you're thinking about trying D&D, this book is for you. Unless you're thinking about trying it, in which case this book isn't for you. Go buy the starter set (which, as has been pointed out by new DMs in this very thread, doesn't do a good job of teaching you how to run the game, and in fact expects you have experience with D&D already. The starter set is there to get you started on 5E, not on roleplaying).
When you get to combat, the very first thing you're told is:
When creating a combat encounter, let your imagination run wild and build something your players will enjoy. Once you have the details figured out, use this section to adjust the difficulty of the encounter.
As if the difficulty of the encounter is not one of the details. It gets it exactly backwards.
We've already gone over the weirdness of the game design when it comes to magic items. How they're distributed is 100% up to the DM and also here's a table for when characters should get magic items.
It also takes until page 235 for the book to actually tell you how to run a game. The preceding 234 pages are world building, which is the last thing a new DM should be doing. Also of note, at no point in the entire DMG is there a section about running combat. That's all in the Player's Handbook.
I really like D&D, 5E is a good time. But they took a good, fun game and wrapped it in some of the most confusing and backwards presentation I've ever seen. My personal favorite example of the horrible design is found in the Curse of Strahd. There's a chance you'll run into someone who gives you a Charm of Heroism. What is the Charm of Heroism? Instead of telling you, it tells you to check your DMG. Chapter 7. Okay, let's look. Charm of Heroism: Same benefit as a Potion of Heroism. Okay, what is that? Shuffle around, find that you get 10 temp hp and are under the effects of Bless. What is Bless? IT DOESN'T SAY. OKAY FINE. TO THE PLAYER'S HANDBOOK. Bless is just an extra +d4 on attacks and saves. That's not in anyway a helpful way to get new people playing. That's busy work for the sake of selling an extra book (or two) to someone.
Maybe everyone who's been playing a while can accept that this is a fun game presented terribly and instead of condescendingly pointing out that a decade of experience helps, you can just point folks in the right direction.
That's one way to do it, I've played with re-adding the proficiency bonus *for each spell level* to direct heals, and making cure wounds a bonus action or a full action if cast at 30 feet, so an 18 wis third level cure wounds would heal for 3d8+12
What I've found from doing that is that combat ends up being more of a slog, and classes with healing slots end up being healbots as healing is less a strategic choice to keep an ally up at a clutch moment and more just a game of fluctuating health bars
It depends on the table, but it certainly didn't feel unbalanced to just keep adding the casting modifier with each level - the party didn't feel any more or less powerful in the scheme of things, healing spells just ended up being used more and things like hold person and darkness and hypnotic pattern got used less. Now if you have any players who WANT to be dedicated healers, and want to feel powerful in doing so but don't want to play a life cleric, something like that is a great idea with no downsides whatsoever
It's pretty much what I ended up adopting as well as I do have players that LOVE using their spells to heal instead of crowd control or damaging. They play healers in most medias available to them and D&D was lacking in that for them and probably where the disconnect is from myself and others. Others see healing as something that they want to keep being low impact for their own reasons. Where as I have at least 2 players in the group that love the Healer Fantasy and had a hard time until Healing Spirit came around as something official that was just NEAT. Cure Wounds I did exactly what you already suggested where applying the modifier for every healing dice is fine by me and didn't break anything.
I have straight up eliminated mass healing word and mass cure wounds and stolen Pathfinder 2's "you can just give up your action AND bonus action to cast those spells as a 30 foot point blank aoes"
Maybe everyone who's been playing a while can accept that this is a fun game presented terribly and instead of condescendingly pointing out that a decade of experience helps, you can just point folks in the right direction.
alright, so I did that already, what now?
the presentation is probably bad, but that's not exactly something someone on the internet can fix unfortunately (my uncle works at Nintendo, not WotC ;P)
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Most new DMs I've interacted with are prepared for that part just fine.
They're less prepared for "How can I tell if this combat is too hard/too easy?", "What loot should players be getting?", "How often should they be resting and how do I fix it if they're resting too often?", "What do this monster's spells do?", "How do I keep combats interesting?", "What's the right DC for this check?", "How do I deal with this player who keeps summoning a bunch of fucking wolves?", "This player wants to buy a +1 sword; how does that work?", and so on.
Sure, I imagine "ignore the rules and make it all up, you don't even need the books, it's an imagination game" is a pretty simple system. It's also not actually 5e, though.
I would suggest that the fact you've got over a decade's experience in DMing is a key component as to why you find 5e so easy to run.
See and this doesn't reflect my experiences at all.
Any player I've ever known that has healing potions is reluctant to use them over healing spells, because spells come back and potions don't. It's the classic "but what if I need it later" situation a lot of the time.
On top of that I find that players that tend to put healing spells on their list want to heal people with their magic.
And I never said to ignore a rule. Healing potions being infinitely in stock is not a rule.
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See this is where I disagree heavily. You're comparing how OP Healing Spirit is to other Healing Spells. But other Healing Spells suck. And I don't think it's an error. They may have stated in a tweet that it slipped through the cracks but they have a tendency to quickly react to players reacting as they did with the Ranger.
I'm comparing Healing Spirit to other spells that output damage and find that they can tend to even out. Out of combat, at level 3, Fireball does 8d6 damage to a potential room full of things and it's a burst, immediate up front amount of damage. How good Healing Spirit heals at level 3 (which is 2d6) over the course of 1 minute, assuming everyone got hit by that fireball and failed their saving throw, you are sacrificing up front, on demand Healing for healing over time which is how I personally see things should be balanced. Same with something like Call Lightning. It does less up front damage then fireball at 3d10 but if you hold the concentration, you can do it every round.
But that's just talking spells. Eldritch Blast/Heavy Crossbow/Longbow every round just way out damages anything that healing spirit can keep up with AND it uses a spell slot/resource where as the other things do not.
So really what it is, Damage has always been the king and healing has never been able to keep up in 5e. Now they FINALLY publish a spell for people who like to heal and people are calling it OP when comparing it to Healing spells, which it is, sure. But NOT when compared to damage out put vs the healing gained.
So if the Druid wants to use it out of combat to help the group, awesome! Keep the party moving! It doesn't affect anything. If they want to use it in combat where it's still actually pretty good, then AWESOME even more so as they are having to hold concentration which means giving up other concentration spells to do. Like we wildly disagree and when you use the words like calling it an error to even exist, it just sounds insulting to someone like myself because your words don't imply it as an "opinion" anymore.
a thousand times this
(this is one of the co-authors of Dungeon World btw)
A third level healing spirit outputs 20d6 healing to an entire group over one minute, and unlike damage spells like fireball there are no saves or resists - it just does. It vastly outdoes any damage spell in terms of efficiency
The designers have acknowledged that it is overpowered, and it isn't even satisfying to use because it doesn't heal in combat. It's, in my opinion, a misstep to simply offer an optional rule for the spell via twitter as opposed to throwing out an errata changing it to match, but w/e
Outside of that, I don't actually think healing really is a problem in 5e, I think it's only a problem if we're talking about every group being razor's edge optimized (and not having a life cleric), which they don't have to be
the amount of gnashing of teeth online I've seen about 5e's healing online vs in actual games is like night and day
Frankly I don't give a shit if someone thinks it's poorly designed, or even if it is poorly designed. That's really immaterial to actually playing and enjoying the game.
I'd rather deal in solutions than critique.
I'm just wondering why the 5e thread has so many people who hate 5e hanging around in it to tell us that 5e is awful and sucks when none of us are designers that work for WOTC
What's the end goal? Are we supposed to admit that we're wrong for liking 5th edition? Or is it simply to shit on any enjoyment we have when we come to talk about a game we're playing or something?
I'm not talking about debating specific mechanics, like healing spirit, but in the last few pages there's a number of posts about 5e itself being bad
This could be arguable, but A)if that was the rationale, then other healing spells released at the same time should have been similarly efficient, and they aren't; Life Transference is a 3rd level spell that damages you for 4d8 and heals someone else for 8d8 as an action - it's roughly on-curve for things like Cure Wounds and Healing Word, not part of an overhaul on the value of healing spells.
B)Other healing spells are undertuned, as I mentioned, but Healing Spirit hugely overshoots the mark. The solution to something being fairly underwhelming is not to make it twenty times as strong and see how that goes.
C)I'd agree that a healing spell needs to heal for more than a comparable damaging action to be competitive as an option, but you're cherry-picking your comparisons: longbow attacks every round may outdamage healing spirit (emphasis on may - it depends on how many different people you're healing each round) but doing so costs that person's action each round, as well, whereas Healing Spirit is ticking for free and only even cost a bonus action to begin with, allowing the caster to also be doing longbow attacks of their own or whatever.
And the Fireball comparison is even more telling - Fireball is one of the most effective damage spells in the game, and the developers have openly said it's intentionally above-curve compared to what a spell of its level 'should' be, and it's an AoE spell which theoretically lets it neutralize the advantage Healing Spirit has in affecting an arbitrary number of targets. Even so, that fireball is going to deal ~28 damage per target, and around half of those targets are going to save for half damage, leaving you with an actual per-target average closer to 21. Healing Spirit, at third level, is going to heal each target for an average of seventy - fully twice the damage the best damage spell deals, and closer to three times as much after you account for the save offered. Moreover, the problem gets even worse as you scale the spells: Not only does healing spirit double (or triple) the damage of fireball, but when you cast both at 4th level, Fireball's damage per target increases by 3.5 whereas Healing Spirit's healing per target increases by...35 again. Now you're comparing a damage spell that's dealing 32 damage to a healing spell that heals for over a hundred. 5th level? Fireball goes to 35 per target (with save for half!), Healing Spirit goes to 140 per target (no rolls required). And so on, the further you scale. And this is essentially your best-case scenario; almost any other damage spell is going to fare even worse in the comparison.
Healing spells should heal for more than an equal-level damage spell deals. They probably shouldn't be healing for three times as much as an equal-level damage spell, though.
Listen, I don't know how much of the last couple pages you've read or how you feel about potions, but I would not try to tell these guys that easy access to arbitrarily high out-of-combat healing doesn't affect anything unless you've got a lot of time on your hands.
Edit: Hilariously, I fucked up my math here and described Fireball as dealing more damage than it actually does, unfairly tilting my analysis in Fireball's favor. Numbers corrected.
Basically an evolution of the edition wars.
Sleep, man, I get that you have a ton of experience. And honestly, I'm sure it would be fun to be at your table. You sound like you're invested in your players' enjoyment, that you design custom encounters and combats, and to a player, the struggle of the DM (or lack of struggle) is largely invisible.
But maybe, just maybe, this isn't a topic you can see clearly? That possibly you are too far removed from an inexperienced newbie DM to see what might be the sticking points they face when learning?
The irony to a lot of people addressing my posts are that they think I'm complaining that I'm not a good DM, or that my games aren't fun. My players love being at my table. We enjoy our games. Players leave my table wanting to run their own games, inspired by what happens.
They quickly figure out how much effort I had to put in to do what they experienced, and more often than not, they either give up the idea of running their own game, or take my advice and pick a different system to run.
DMing is hard. You need to be an actor, skilled in improv, be great at managing social expectations and dynamics, and also have a firm grasp of great story telling. You also need to be a system master for whatever game you need to run.
Why should you also have to design and build the actual game you're going to run, if you're expected to drop $$$ on official books and designs?
Like, it's true, all you need to *really* play "5E" are:
- Roll a d20 to resolve conflict, add relevant ability / proficiency modifiers
- Advantage / Disadvantage to simplify situational bonuses
- Class / Spell lists?
But why the hell should I fork over ~$150 for the basic 3 books, plus ~$50/ea for splat books.
Whereas telling people that the problem they're having with a game is only because they're playing it wrong instead of being good at it like you is a conversational strategy which does not seem to have evolved at all!
This is a reply to the Adam Koebel rant:
I don't know how to embed Twitter pictures
Except every time we try to bring up a problem we're having with 5E, the response is generally "you're playing it wrong", which then devolves into a giant argument about who is playing what wrong or right.
They have actually never used these words. Maybe over performing but NOT over powered. They said they would keep an eye on it and he offered a quick, off the cuff remark due to everyone up in arms. Then he later comes along and outright says that they AREN'T changing the spell. Which means the designers looked at it and decided against it which has to mean something?
As for @Abbalah , my point of your comparison is that one is up front and direct, which surprise surprise has a MUCH bigger impact in a fight. What Healing Spirit does is just get people back down the path for taking a minute and a spell (and yes in the end it will heal for more than a damaging spell but it's literally over the course of an entire minute so the healing should outpace the damage of a direct applied affect in my mind). It doesn't actually impact combat and per Jeremy Crawford they don't design their encounters based on a party being lower on Hp and resources but rather always being healthy as they don't know when the party would fight said encounter. I guess I've always done the same thing but I will concede that a DM that isn't used to this might have a clear cut set of encounter beats in their head and thinking that "by the end of this dungeon level, the party should barely be holding on so I'll design it based on them having lower HP". So for these people it disrupts the flow.
I guess I'll just never agree with anyone that this spell is busted. And I never get to PLAY as a player. I'd love to, but it's not in the cards so I don't have some vested interest in seeing the spell preserved other than "Oh a healing spell that heals worth slotting, even IF just out of combat!".
As for the potion argument, I did indeed read it. I think my opinion is somewhere in the middle.
Do I think being able to buy 50 healing potions or whatever at a time breaks the game? Honestly, no I don't. I think mechanically it's fine. I just think when it comes to running the game that there aren't shops with an endless supply of such things, or likely even 50. They take awhile to make and 50 gold is a LOT to most people. But if I came up with a way where the party could legitimately drop 50 gold a pop for 2d4+2 healing? Sure, why not? It doesn't break my game.
Just paste in the raw url and automagic takes care of it.
Also I imagine that a professional game designer hearing that problems in professional game design are not really problems because folks can fix the problems themselves is infuriating. Sure, folks can fix things themselves or the professionals we hire to do it could be good at their job.
Edit: My read on Adam's point is a bit more aggressive than he is in that twitter thread but on the same general theme about understanding the design intent and what went wrong because that's how you get better.
And there are stats for them, too.
Healing Spirit is bad because it invalidates an entire class of spells, I'd argue (every other healing spell until this point). Prayer of Healing especially, considering that it's intended to be the "out-of-combat" option but Healing Spirit does far more in far less time? That makes no sense to me. Given that I've seen the others used (and used some myself) a decent amount in my own games, that seems like extraordinarily poor design.
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League of Legends: Doctor Ivellius
Twitch, probably another place or two I forget: LPIvellius
Because this is the D&D thread, and I love D&D, and I'd play a 5E game if one were available to me at the moment (though, at the moment, I'd probably prefer a different system).
Because I want to make life easier for people new to the hobby.
Because I like talking about DMing challenges people face.
Like, at no point have I shit on anyone for "enjoyment we have when we come to talk about a game we're playing." I love hearing stories of what people are doing and the adventures they're running.
But when someone posts about a problem they have with the rules - like CR - and someone's response is, "The rules are totally fine and work perfectly; when I use them, I ignore a lot and change a bunch in the following ways and kinda eyball this, that, and the other thing, but the rules are fine." Well, I don't see how that's helpful - especially when all of that is relying on years and years of knowledge of playing D&D, and the person asking is a newbie. Like, it should be okay to say, "Yeah - the ruleset has some problems. X, Y, and Z don't work so well. Here's some things I change to get what I want," but for some reason, people just seem incapable of that first step.
Or, like, in-combat healing being kinda weak and a suboptimal use of your turn a lot of the time. This is a thing that's true (queue the people telling me it's not
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
I'd think you'd only do that if you thought the game was fun enough to warrant it.
As far as the previous arguments of what people should spend money on and how the game doesn't go into details to help this out;
Could 5e use another splat book to help this out? Sure, maybe. Someone else did the kickstarter for it, however, and now they won't have to. For better or worse the game didn't put exact values on all that stuff and that's obviously going to be a "beauty in the eye of the beholder" type thing where no one is right or wrong, they're all just playing their game different. I also mean this for newer players/DMs too. Because the truth is they probably couldn't fit anymore in the book for something like that. I'm sure plenty of things got cut they would have rather kept and I doubt something like that would be on the top of their list. Now I'm not saying this is right or wrong as, again, this is perspective.
But even as a new player and eventual DM, it didn't really come up often the details of what people could spend their money on regularly. It just might not come up for some people ever. They use it to buy drinks, sleep at nicer inns, and sure, maybe buy magic items and stuff if the place allows. Maybe they pass it out to the village to help it thrive. Maybe they run a village. Or a city. And the details on how much that would cost would be super awesome to see! I know I'd be curious to see any recent numbers for that kind of thing. But there are also other areas in the game I'm just as if not more excited to see as well and it becomes one of those things where they are picking their favorite kid. They have limited runs on books on purpose so they don't over flood things. So what happens is what we have now where some things fall through the cracks.
5e isn't perfect in that it doesn't have everything spelled out in the books (though it has a lot more spelled out than people realize. The DMG gets ignored a lot. Not saying in these forums, just in general). Either it didn't think it needed to, or maybe it thought going too far down the rabbit hole in the details was a bad thing. To some people it is, to some it isn't. That's not a "flaw" of the game to everyone. It was a choice made that some see as flawed but others are happy with.
TLDR Sleep is right and so are you. The three books don't spell out every item it could and that's a bad thing. Also, the three books don't spell out every item it could and that's a good thing. The game was made as it was by design and that design obviously isn't for everyone. Nothing ever is. Some like the system enough to adapt. Others look for something better. And others still love the system as it is without having/wanting to adapt as they see it runs great as is. But expressing your displeasure with a part of the system is ALSO a good thing. It gives devs something to think about if they ever happen upon it. Maybe they'll disagree and do nothing but sometimes it will lead to something. So having discourse is great! Obviously people will have counter opinions and that's great too so long as none of it's mean spirited.
So I guess that's where my ultimate disconnect with the conversation lies.
I've been in tons of combats as both a player and DM where a well-timed cure wounds has kept a party wipe from
happening.
Now, maybe they should be buffed. I can understand examining how those spells are balanced.
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hell, I've seen some good ideas sprinkled in here in between the merry go round of "yeah huh" "nuh uh"
i mean, if the goal is to admit the game has problems out of the box, then sure, EVERY game has issues... I just think that those of us who have played for a long time would rather just plug the holes we find and move on to playing the game we want to play like we always have
where do we go from there? like, to pick on @JustTee for a moment, your entire tone has been "well I'm new and I have all these problems" and then you have usually followed with "and I shouldn't have to fix these myself harumph"
the whole thing just funnels back into a combative argument on both sides
the new DMs in the audience, what ARE your pain points, and are you willing to do a little hackery to plug those holes for your game? that's a discussion worth having in my mind.
I guess that's why I'll never get this stance as Prayer of Healing ... sucks. Heck the entire class of spells mostly suck which is why people get all armchair about "don't use healing spells in combat and only ever out of combat when it's necessary as it's a waste of a spell slot". Even Bards and Wizards get a better Prayer of Healing in Catnap which has the added benefit of getting Short Rest Classes back at full power. In the same amount of time as Prayer of Healing. I've seen Prayer of Healing once and the Cleric unlearned it the next day and I too felt it was underwhelming but whatever. I figured maybe if they were a life cleric it might have picked up a bit? But that's just personal experience as was yours so it's hardly telling.
So I guess maybe I do agree with you. Healing Spirit does make most of the other healing spells look like garbage (excluding Heal, Regenerate, and Healing Word as they each have their own unique qualities). My thing is just that they ARE way underpowered and it points it out. And I know it's said that it goes too far in the other direction, which is where the views part ways.
I just want to expand on this a bit.
I am not what I would consider an amazing DM; I'm, at best, "pretty good."
However, I've run entire adventures for tables of 5-7 players where I had no prepared stats at all for any of the enemies they encountered. I was able to do it completely off-the-cuff, because 1) I knew the rules of the system I was using (hacked 3.5ish) forwards and backwards, 2) I knew my players and their characters well, and 3) I'd been doing this for long enough that I knew that, e.g., a 1st-level badguy should have an AC of 12-16 and 6, 10, or 20 HP depending on how tanky I wanted it to be, and saves of -1 to +4; sprinkle in some abilities (on death, spawn 1d4 baby centipedes; +1 fire damage; spit a 4-square line of 1d4 acid; stands up on its turn with 1 HP as long as the Shaman is dancing; etc.) and you can get some super varied, fun combats.
But, like, I would never recommend that method to a new DM. A new DM should have a system in place that helps them get similar results - varied, fun combats - without the need for eyeballing things and making lots of guesses.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
Except, several people (myself included) have in fact detailed where our pain points are, and we get told "no you're wrong those aren't pain points because you just have to make it up wholecloth, you see? So easy."
We've also said how and why we've changed things, but again, get told "nah everythings fine, you just do this thing that isn't spelled out to you at all in any of the books". Like, look just a few posts above you:
My pain points with DMing 5E:
1 - Building satisfactory encounters is something that is incredibly difficult, potentially time consuming, and uses a ton of things that just isn't usefully spelled out anywhere. There are pages and pages of text in the DMG detailing how to build combat encounters, and how to use the math to determine how difficult it would be for a given party of a given number of players at a given level.
It is widely regarded as a baseline at best, wildly useless at worst.
When that's pointed out, rather than being given some help at adjusting CR / encounters, we're told "nah encounter building is fine I just eyeball everything read every stat block and mentally adjust and calculate how that might affect my party and also throw in terrain".
2 - The base incentive system for players using their powers and spells leads them wanting to try to game long rests, or leaves portions of the party feeling useless if they use all their long rest resources in the first fight of the morning. See above for why some players might be forced to use more powers than intended for fights, as the difficulties can be hard to judge when designing the encounters.
Oh, also, for some reason, some classes are incentivized to try to rest in short 1 hour periods, and others don't get anything until long rests.
Oh, also, the game design specifically calls out adventure days, how many fights a party should face before resting, etc etc etc. I don't know a single person who *actually* uses those numbers and doesn't end up tearing their hair out.
3 - A lot of teaching new players 5E results in my explanation being "for reasons".
Why do dwarves and basically only dwarves move 25 feet per round? Why do spells list their ranges extremely specifically, but combats rarely (if ever) happen further than 60 feet apart? Why are so many things labeled "levels"? Why are spells organized so weirdly in the PHB? Why do equipment charts have so many different items that are basically not at all different except for cost? Why are so many pieces of equipment so specifically detailed when there isn't really anything different between them?
4 - Basically everything @Abbalah said in the first post on this page:
They're less prepared for "How can I tell if this combat is too hard/too easy?", "What loot should players be getting?", "How often should they be resting and how do I fix it if they're resting too often?", "What do this monster's spells do?", "How do I keep combats interesting?", "What's the right DC for this check?", "How do I deal with this player who keeps summoning a bunch of fucking wolves?", "This player wants to buy a +1 sword; how does that work?", and so on.
5 - Oh, I forgot, my player's main pain point - that on any given turn, there is an extremely obvious "optimal" choice, and unless there are other things in the fight going on, combats tend to feel pretty boring. Because mechanically, each class is fairly limited in what it can do. And often times, with new players at least, being presented with the idea that "you can do anything" often means "holy shit I have no idea what to do I guess I'll just swing my sword at the thing".
The solution to making D&D 5E combat interesting, it turns out, is to not run D&D 5E combat as presented by the pages and pages of rules. Because most of those rules end up distilled as "I hit the monster with my Weapon/Spell as hard as I can". Instead, you have to provide context, environments, and space for player improv. Which again, adds to the challenge of balancing the mechanics, because, surprise surprise, I am not a professional game designer. And if the solution to "how to make 5E combat interesting" is "Don't use 5E combat as written, instead use your narrative to make the boring mechanics less boring" I would probably suggest that the mechanics kind of suck.
As for solutions:
Honestly late-stage 4E sounds like it's pretty sweet. Unfortunately, I have no idea what books I'd actually have to get in order to get an understanding together of what that means. Also, my players don't want to deal with all the extra stuff of 4E (floating modifiers, excess math), but would probably love to have the extra combat abilities, and tighter balancing between <fully rested> state and <exhausted> state. So I've mostly tried to hack 5E with bits and pieces from Dungeon World (for running interesting combats), Stars Without Number (for GM-side prep), and Spellbound Kingdom (for player based mechanical options).
It is both okay to seek and offer solutions AND to discuss perceived shortcomings of the game for the purpose of gaining a deeper understanding of those shortcomings without any intention of solving a problem.
The problem you run into is that a common use case for in-combat healing with 'a well-timed cure wounds' looks a little like this:
->Monster with 11 HP remaining attacks a player for 9 damage, bringing them down to 10 HP
->Cleric who could cast Inflict Wounds for 3d10 damage, very likely killing the monster, instead spends turn casting Cure Wounds for 7, putting teammate back at 17
->Healed player attacks monster, misses
->Monster goes again, hits same player for 9 damage again. Player is now at 8 HP, but the cleric has one less spell slot.
The metaphor is a sinking canoe: Incoming damage is the water that's filling your boat. Healing is bailing the water out with a bucket. Killing the monster fixes the hole in the bottom so the water stops getting in. The efficient solution is to stop the water from getting in as quickly as possible, then bail out the water that got in before you could close it - otherwise you just end up with more water to move.
Doubly so once you recognize that you only get to use the bucket four times a day, and if you spend them all on bailing water out while there's still a hole in your boat, you'll just find yourself in a boat full of water with no bucket.
Well, we have to get there first, right? It's pretty hard to provide solutions to problems we can't even agree are problems, and that would be a weird expectation to have.
The bar for being constructive can't be 'you provided a solution, and then, after that, you convinced people that there was a problem that needed solving'.
If every problem, complaint, or simple observation about the game is stonewalled with "that's not true, you're just playing it wrong, you should practice more, the rules aren't important, nothing is real, everything is optional, just make it up" the person describing the problem is not the one preventing things from moving forward constructively.
It requires a lot of homebrewing the healing spells to actually be competitive at actually outhealing damage, at least until higher levels when the likes of Heal and later Mass Heal come into play - that's why I don't think it's the intent
Clerics, Druids, and Bards each get an additional class feature called Healing Power. This class feature grants a spell that doesn't need to be prepared and doesn't use up spell slots, but can only be cast a number of times per short rest equal to your proficiency bonus. As a bonus action, the spell heals the target for roughly equal to what you'd get out of an average Hit Die, say 1d8+spellcasting modifier.
Boom. Useful healing that is a reliable resource, and it doesn't get in the way of doing other cool things on the healer's turn.
What I've found from doing that is that combat ends up being more of a slog, and classes with healing slots end up being healbots as healing is less a strategic choice to keep an ally up at a clutch moment and more just a game of fluctuating health bars
It depends on the table, but it certainly didn't feel unbalanced to just keep adding the casting modifier with each level - the party didn't feel any more or less powerful in the scheme of things, healing spells just ended up being used more and things like hold person and darkness and hypnotic pattern got used less. Now if you have any players who WANT to be dedicated healers, and want to feel powerful in doing so but don't want to play a life cleric, something like that is a great idea with no downsides whatsoever
I apply the recommendations (CR 1 monster = full party of level 1 PCs) for a basic start as an 'average' encounter. I was having a bit of trouble myself until it was pointed out explicitly that number of actions provides a big advantage, and so I use average CR as a guesstimate
in practice, I still end up adjusting monster HP totals during a combat just to fine tweak. beyond that, I also try to program in ways to avoid / get out of a given battle too, so there's that, but I think the response you're going to give me is that's a sidestep, so unfortunately my answer is time and experience for feeling out your group and if they're struggling, offer them ways out when they get in over their head
this is fair; I've never run across parties who sleep all the time, but if I were to combat that it would be putting them in the hotseat with time-critical objectives
I'm also a fan of Colville's tactic of hitting them with encounters during the rest period; that's probably the easiest one to do. if they have the option to go back to town and do it though, there's probably not much you can do there but roll with the punches
as for the different resting incentives, a rule I used back when Saga Edition came out for d20 (the last Star Wars d20 that was a big experiment bed for what would become DnD4) is let all daily / long rest resources go to per encounter. in this case, it would probably be short rest. this will if you apply it unilaterally make some classes incredibly strong so that's an idea I'd probably only apply if I was comfortable with the power spike
dwarves - D&D/fantasy baggage from the wargaming roots. included to appeal to grognards
spell ranges - same thing
levels - I dunno what you mean by this, elaborate?
organization - no idea
items - wargaming baggage again; historically old editions loved to detail out every permutation of every weapon
Too hard/too easy: put your players in it. if it's too easy, let them knock the bowling pins down. if it's too hard, look at why (maybe your players are rolling like ass, maybe the monsters are exploiting a weakness in your party) and either A: let them deal with the consequences or B: chop some health off some of the non-named monsters and tilt the numbers back in their favor. if you go with option A, have the monsters sell unconscious heroes back to your party for some money (hey look a gold sink!) (thank you Matt Colville for this one)
Loot: my preference is ask what your players plan to go for and a couple wishlist items. in the early-to-midgame, give them items that are maybe not exactly what they asked for, but fill a niche (example, if the wizard wants a fireball wand, give him a wand of magic missile instead). in the late game, let them make the items (if you want to) or have them follow up specific leads to that item, since they're probably aiming at very rare/artifact level gear.
alternatively, let your players go on a trek to a place where they might be able to buy and/or commission the items of their dreams
Rests: if they rest too much out in the woods, wandering monsters. if they don't rest... break some bones? you could up the "lethality" of the game by introducing a simple debility system a la dungeon world that represents long-term injuries. Saga edition did something kinda like this with a "Condition Track", details here on that
Monster spells: i make judicious amounts of spell cards, and when i write down a statblock for use i leave off most of the shit WOTC seems to feel is essential to the monster like its senses and super detailed explanations of its attacks
example: my party fought some animated armors. I wrote out on an index card AC 18, HP 33, spd 25, 2 attacks longsword +4 1d10+2. if anything else is needed I have the block linked directly from my onenote (which as an aside onenote on mobile is REALLY good)
if i had a spell on there it'd be like, Fireball - 8d6 dex half
Interesting Combats: hoo boy, this is a long one. I've had the most success thus far when I include something interesting about the terrain, whether that be patches of difficult terrain (maybe it's avoidable via checks, maybe it's just there like deep water) and negative effects (Lair actions!) that occur outside of the "monsters"
in my big arc-ending boss fight, the players ended up fighting a giant plague mushroom that had started to assimilate a dryad. they fought some cordyceps goblins as fodder (think The Last of Us zombies), as well as a pair of sludge elementals, which was all taking place in a giant grotto with a small island in the middle (where the mushroom was) and hip-deep water surrounding it
the mushroom didn't really do anything except summon little mushroom grenades that would float up from under the water and explode with poisonous spores
it also had a recharge ability to summon more sludge elementals
the dryad was flinging some spells around while this was happening and it was a very tense/fun encounter (which they managed to defeat and even save the dryad but that's another story)
DC for the check: I think this is easier to eyeball in 5e than it was previous because of the bounded mechanics. in 3/4 they encouraged you to scale stuff up or down but honestly you just need to know the class archetypes and what saves they're strong at, and set the DCs accordingly. 10 is basic, 15 is moderate, 20 is hard, and then play around in those ranges to taste. if the effect is really punishing, maybe lower the DC, or maybe you raise it to make the tension go up
I'm also a fan of adopting a dungeon world move here and "telling the consequences and asking" (look up GM moves in DW if you haven't, it's a good read). there's been a few times where a player has asked to do something dangerous and I tell them what will happen up front on a success/failure so they can decide how to proceed
The Wolf Whisperer: hmm. social consequences? maybe he builds a reputation as the Wolf Mage? start throwing fireballs at the entire pack? start using their own tactics against them but maybe one step higher? can't imagine a bunch of worgs would be fun to fight against, but you could definitely narrate a cool wolfwizard and his pack vs. the orcs and the worgs battle
how do I buy a +1 sword?: you have to answer the question as a DM if that's something they can do or can't do. if they can, tell them honestly. "Well, in character, you don't know, but your character has heard of [Faction] in [City] that specializes in the acquisition of potent enchanted items" or "The High Wizard Cliff Magicbottom has been known to work off commission"
I don't think there's a right or wrong way, PHB and DMG be damned--do what makes sense for your game. if you haven't considered that, then do so now, and answer the player honestly.
this is a mentality thing--if you want to inspire your players to do feats of derring-do, you have to show them those feats of derring-do are worth derring-doing
in my last session the Monk attempted to tackle an animated armor out of a hole in the wall on the second floor of a tower, which entailed a 30 foot drop (and would have definitely taken the armor out of the fight, if only temporarily)
he rolled his strength, I adjudicated with disadvantage due to him being a smol boi vs a large heavy construct, and he rolled a 1; he pushed the armor but he pushed with it and ended up having to grasp on the ledge with a well-timed acrobatics and then climbed back up with some movement
the group very much enjoyed this
try out 13th age, freely available in SRD form here. i haven't played it, but many folk here have, and it works off 4e's assumptions.
EDIT: if anyone wants to get better at running games in general, apocalypse engine games have great GM advice, and Dungeon World in particular is an analog. there's also an amazing guide here that talks about the ethos of DW and how to run it in detail that I think overlaps with 5e in very critical ways for maximum fun enhancement
The problem is that, this problem you are having isn't actually in 5e.
For instance, if i told you "the problem i have with 3.5 is that it doesn't have enough splat books in order to let players make interesting and unique characters." you would be right to suggest that this is incorrect; 3.5 had shit tonnes of splat and one of the common problems is that there is too much.
"healing spells are undertuned because you can just buy infinite healing potions" -> No actually you cannot buy infinite healing potions that is not in 5e. You have to modify the base rules of 5e to have that be a rule and even though WoTC has officially done that for one of its official systems that does not make it "the rule" for 5e. And even if you do let people buy lots of healing potions actual people playing the game don't tend to use them like that. And even if they do, out of combat healing isn't the biggest deal.
That being said, I don't like healing spirit. Its probably overtuned in terms of HP/spell slot when you rank it up. But its also not a combat spell and its main weakness is that when over-casting it you attain too much value. Prayer of Healing has similar value to healing spirit (2d8+3-5 per person) = 52 HP for a party of 4 at 4 Spellcasting mod. But you only gain 4.5 HP/person (18) per spell level while you attain 35 HP per spell level of healing spirit and, because the spell is more granular its harder to waste HP.
In terms of in combat spot healing i don't think HS is that strong. 1d6/lvl/round is weak for a concentration spell. Combats rarely last more than 3 rounds anyway and while its bonus action casting time seems great you're unlikely to have a powerful oomph to do anyway because you're a druid or a ranger(druids need concentration most of their powerful attack spells and you cannot cast this and another powerful spell at the same time due to bonus action casting restrictions) rangers tend to like to use their bonus actions and also don't get many spells).
There is some bard/cleric cheese you could do in order to make it kinda hilarious but probably not worse than any of the other things bards can do and losing a top end level would matter.
It's pretty much what I ended up adopting as well as I do have players that LOVE using their spells to heal instead of crowd control or damaging. They play healers in most medias available to them and D&D was lacking in that for them and probably where the disconnect is from myself and others. Others see healing as something that they want to keep being low impact for their own reasons. Where as I have at least 2 players in the group that love the Healer Fantasy and had a hard time until Healing Spirit came around as something official that was just NEAT. Cure Wounds I did exactly what you already suggested where applying the modifier for every healing dice is fine by me and didn't break anything.
Cleric who could cast inflict for 3d10 does so and misses.
Now we're at Monster with 11 HP and player at 10 and its the players turn.
But yes, cure wounds is better spent out of combat we have discussed this. It doesn't make the spell bad it makes the spell different in value.
If out of combat healing is an issue then catnap is 100% not better than prayer of healing
Catnap lets players take short rests 50 minutes faster 1/day but doesn't provide any margin on actual HP/day/slot. IME its rare that you can rest for 10 minutes but not an hour.
I guess they could make 5e more simple, other than that I'm not sure of how to come up with solid guidelines without exception for encounter difficulty
If people pointing out pain points results in being told they aren't actually pain points and we're bad DMs for thinking they are, then what do you expect will be the response?
My pain points are that the book tries to have it every possible way and ends up being a terrible way to introduce people to the hobby. From the opening two paragraphs of the DMG:
So, if you're thinking about trying D&D, this book is for you. Unless you're thinking about trying it, in which case this book isn't for you. Go buy the starter set (which, as has been pointed out by new DMs in this very thread, doesn't do a good job of teaching you how to run the game, and in fact expects you have experience with D&D already. The starter set is there to get you started on 5E, not on roleplaying).
When you get to combat, the very first thing you're told is: As if the difficulty of the encounter is not one of the details. It gets it exactly backwards.
We've already gone over the weirdness of the game design when it comes to magic items. How they're distributed is 100% up to the DM and also here's a table for when characters should get magic items.
It also takes until page 235 for the book to actually tell you how to run a game. The preceding 234 pages are world building, which is the last thing a new DM should be doing. Also of note, at no point in the entire DMG is there a section about running combat. That's all in the Player's Handbook.
I really like D&D, 5E is a good time. But they took a good, fun game and wrapped it in some of the most confusing and backwards presentation I've ever seen. My personal favorite example of the horrible design is found in the Curse of Strahd. There's a chance you'll run into someone who gives you a Charm of Heroism. What is the Charm of Heroism? Instead of telling you, it tells you to check your DMG. Chapter 7. Okay, let's look. Charm of Heroism: Same benefit as a Potion of Heroism. Okay, what is that? Shuffle around, find that you get 10 temp hp and are under the effects of Bless. What is Bless? IT DOESN'T SAY. OKAY FINE. TO THE PLAYER'S HANDBOOK. Bless is just an extra +d4 on attacks and saves. That's not in anyway a helpful way to get new people playing. That's busy work for the sake of selling an extra book (or two) to someone.
Maybe everyone who's been playing a while can accept that this is a fun game presented terribly and instead of condescendingly pointing out that a decade of experience helps, you can just point folks in the right direction.
I have straight up eliminated mass healing word and mass cure wounds and stolen Pathfinder 2's "you can just give up your action AND bonus action to cast those spells as a 30 foot point blank aoes"
it's met with resounding approval from my players
alright, so I did that already, what now?
the presentation is probably bad, but that's not exactly something someone on the internet can fix unfortunately (my uncle works at Nintendo, not WotC ;P)