Great overview of alternative ways to use Healing Surges. http://www.roleplayingpro.com/2009/09/22/the-healing-surge-dm%E2%80%99s-little-helper/
That being said, we've yet to encounter heavy usage of Healing Surges. I'm not sure if it's because we are resetting between gaming sessions and so they really don't have as much time to run down or if it's because the player's just really aren't taking that much damage. In fact, the damage department seems either feast or famine.
I've heard that defender classes should feel like they are being knocked down and pop right back up, but the one time we've seen that the players felt the encounter was much too hard. I'm still struggling to get the feel of the combat just right.
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Those are some cool ideas. I like the notion of accepting that Healing Surges represent a sort of abstract "Life Force" and could be used for something as a bonus to a Skill Check - the equivalent of someone overextending themselves when it really counts. Open to abuse, certainly, but like you, Keven, I found Healing Surges lying fallow at times, and this would give them a use during those downtimes and maybe lessen the frustration of losing a check to poor dice rolls.
ReplyDeleteIn the arc I ran I had the players doing some jungle trekking and ran a fair number of Endurance checks to chop away at healing surges. Even so, I don't recall their loss impacting the party very heavily.
Healing Surges seem to work most according to intent (that is to say, tactically) when the players are in the middle of straight-up dungeon crawls and all resources are directed toward combat. Which has just never been my favorite part of D&D.
We've run out of healing surges in both the games I'm in (one playing, one GMing). If you've got one healer and one backup healer in the group, and you go through a couple of solid fights, it seems like at least one, maybe two characters will expend all of them.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I like the use of healing surges as damage and power source in this article. I'm much more skeptical of healing surge as bonus, which seems ripe for abuse. But the other stuff? Cool ideas, and I like them quite a bit.