You don't need a healer in D&D 5e

This blog is still ostensibly focused, at least in part, on OSR play. So, while I get on with writing my Black Hack campaign setting, and until I can blog about that, here's a point of comparison between the new school and the old school:

You pretty much need at least one healer (meaning: Cleric) in old school Dungeons and Dragons. You don't need such a thing in fifth edition Dungeons and Dragons.

Is this noteworthy? Well, it says a lot about the specific mechanics of the games in question, but also more broadly about their expected playstyle.

Let's start with specifics, briefly. In 5e, there exists a concept called the "short rest". Basically, this amounts to a breather, taking one hour, in which a character can roll as many of their Hit Dice as they want, and recharge that many Hp, up to their maximum. Those hit dice are then expended, to be recharged with future "long rests" of 6 hours (4 for elves, for reasons). So, for those who've played Into the Odd but not 5e (so no-one), it's the equivalent of recharging your hit protection with a sit down and a swig of water after a fight - it just takes a bit longer. And this is an apt comparison; as it stands, with short rests of one hour, the short rest is leaning on the concept of hitpoints as stamina - the ability to defend yourself in battle, and the energy this takes, as opposed to the actual ability of your constitution to weather blows. That's fine. But note that, where Into the Odd has your "meat points" sitting underneath your Hp (in the form of your Strength score), and that these take a longer time to recoup, 5e has no such longer-term consequences built in.

In gameplay, what this means is two things. First, characters in 5e, unless a combat has gone especially badly, can usually regain almost all their Hp in time for the next fight, and can pretty much keep doing so all day. But second, and more importantly, the two-rest system shifts the focus of the game onto the "adventuring day". Characters regain practically all of their resources overnight (there's a limit case where they might regain fewer hit dice, but hitpoints themselves recharge fully overnight without expending dice anyway). What this means is that all of the danger to life and limb that characters are put in has to gang up on them within 24 hours to put them in any serious peril. And this shifts the framework of the game from active player participation to passive player endurance.

D&D (and other games like Tunnels and Trolls) was originally about delving into dungeons to get treasure. At least, that was the structure; you can spin the "Delve into x to get y" structure any number of ways to fit it to taste, which is part of where the game's fecundity comes from. But anyway. Delving into dungeons. When you did that, you'd take some damage from a fight or a trap, maybe get your ass kicked and have to run away. And, then, while you were catching your breath, you had to make a choice: Push on, or withdraw. If you pushed on, and you didn't have enough hits left in you, you'd die. But if you withdrew to heal up, the dungeon would restock; monsters would flow back like the tide returning in, and you'd have to fight your way back to this point all over again, and you might not be as lucky in getting here next time.

This decision worked to drive gameplay because healing took ages. In Moldvay Basic, natural healing happens at 1-3 Hp per day. In Tunnels and Trolls, where CON points work as hitpoints, and most characters have about 9-12 of them, and you regain one CON point per day of rest, healing could take weeks. So you'd come back to the dungeon to find that the orcs, because you eliminated their goblin rivals, have taken the place over, and fortified it even further. So this decision drove the whole game: How far do you want to push your luck, knowing that you might not get such a good shot at riches/magic items/that next dungeon level again next time?

In the context of this decision, the healer represents a complex boon to the party. Effectively, they have a limited ability to short-circuit this game mechanism (seems like a lot of good game elements work like this) - they allow a limited few resources to stave off the decision, so that when the characters make it the stakes are even higher - they're further into the dungeon, so the territory is more dangerous, but the rewards also more lucrative. Effectively, the healer was the short rest mechanic in these games, but in a way that gave the players the reins, rather than forcing the DM to take them.

This mechanism, and thus this choice, doesn't exist in the current edition of D&D. Much ink has been spilled over the problem of incorporating into the adventuring day the nuances of player-motivated play. Essentially, the problem is this: Any party with an ounce of sense who can set the pace at which dangerous encounters occur isn't going to line them all up within the same 24 hour-window, especially when that's the clock to which their ability to heal is tied, and especially given the enormity of the dangerous encounters that have to happen in such a short time to actually challenge the characters mechanically.

So if you give the players the reins, you end up with the "2-minute workday", where characters dip into the dungeon (or whatever challenge), then retreat to heal fully (and regain expended abilities), then repeat the next day. There's no danger for the characters, since they have more resources than they need, and no penalty, since restocking (or the equivalent mechanism for recharging danger in non-dungeonesque adventures) doesn't happen fast enough, at least without feeling ad hoc and contrived. In fact, what penalty there is is exacted on the pace of the game.

Conversely, the DM might force the characters through whatever 24 hours of hell they have prepared in an effort to bring them close to actual peril by grinding them down. And I think something approaching this is the actual intention behind the design of the rest system; the DM can throw encounter after encounter at the players in a predetermined gauntlet, and the players weather it as best they can. And this, finally, is what I mean when I say that the mode of player engagement has changed from active risk-taking to passive endurance. You're no longer seeing how far you can push your luck, you're now having to put up with the bad guys following you home, and just dealing with whatever punishment they deliver.

That's half the story. I know, I know, but the other half is much shorter. And I know, the golden rule of this blog was no aggro. I'm honestly just doing mechanical analysis.

By far my favourite representation of the archetypal cleric, from Pathfinder

The other half is that, as a combat-focused game with short rests as they stand, 5e discourages healing as being an ineffective combat strategy. The important part of that is that healing is a exclusively a combat strategy; since you have effectively all the healing you could want outside of combat, healing is only useful in a pinch when you need a top-up mid-fight (interestingly, analogous to needing a top-up mid-dungeon in older editions). And in those instances, it's less effective than just attacking. Because you don't suffer any disadvantages to fighting for being wounded, and because you suffer no long-term effects for the damage, it's always more effective to try to take out the other guy, tank the damage, then regain the hitpoints later, rather than having someone waste both an action and a (potentially damage-dealing) spell slot healing you (the Angry GM calls this the "race to zero hitpoints"). The only time healing is the most useful option is when someone has actually bitten the dust, and is in 5e's limbo near-death state - and even then it's only because, while they're in that state, they're not dealing damage.

So all of 5e is set up to minimise the utility of the healer, because it reduces the long-term effects of combat, and thereby shifts the focus away from active player participation and towards passive player endurance. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

Okay, so a brief note on how you fix it if your group's dead set on playing 5e. I could go on and on about the design decisions therein, but that'll wait for other posts. And yes, this is still OSR related: This is how you take the first step to OSR-ifying 5e. Maybe that should've been the title, it's practically clickbait.

To belabour an old metaphor, 5e tries to swap the old Doom method of hunting around for health packs for something more modern and easier to balance. New DMs can't judge very well the difficulty of challenges if they don't know what state the party will be in when they reach them, like you can't judge the difficulty of a room full of monsters in Doom because you don't know if the player will be on 200% health (and armour, and ammo) or 1%. So, in the interests of a tailored experience, design shifted to a quicker recharge-cycle. But, for 5e, it shifted too far the other way - it went to the sort of Call of Duty-style shooter where you can crouch behind cover for five seconds and recharge your health fully, with no long-term consequences. Fast-paced and punchy, sure, but it doesn't make for strategic play - the only time you die is when you misjudge the precise shade of red your screen has turned.

What you want to shoot for is the middle ground, the Halo: Combat Evolved or Halo: Reach system. In those games, you have a shield bar that recharges after a few seconds (although not too few), and a health bar that relies on health packs to recharge, and is protected by your shield. In other words, short-term and long-term consequences for taking damage in combat.

So here's my system: A long rest takes a full week resting up, doing light activity etc., as per the "gritty realism" rules in the DMG. Likewise, per gritty realism, a short rest takes 8 hours. This means you at least give the monsters a chance to regroup, if not fully reinforce a dungeon complex, before your next foray - leaving the adventure site to heal should always come with an associated risk. On top of this, make available a "short rest in a bag". This is an item that allows adventurers to gain the benefits of a short rest in a short timespan; it consists of tinctures and mildly magical herbs (for regaining powers and spell slots, if allowed by class), as well as more mundane bandages, splints and medical items, stimulants and painkillers. It can be administered in 15-20 minutes, time which is treated exactly as a short rest.

Note that all that this does is accelerate the short rest - it doesn't grant extra hit dice etc., just allows you to spend them quicker than the 8 hours in the gritty realism rules. It's basically the equivalent of a pick-me-up cup of coffee - you're borrowing from future-you, as Terry Pratchett would say. Further, the SRiaB should be expensive, heavy and unwieldy - making it hard to come by and carry makes it more of a choice and less of a de facto obligation. Consider making it delicate too; breaking it (e.g.: as a consequence for a critical failure of some sort) will force the party to re-evaluate their plans, and can up the tension of a delve.

There's more scope to season this mechanism to taste. If you're worried about overuse, limit the effects to one per character per 24 hours, or per natural short rest. You can make different items work for different classes, both for flavour and to make them non-transferable (although this might decrease their utility as a party-wide resource-management minigame). The point is to allow some of the daring, fast paced, high-octane modern gaming action, while tying it to a resource such that it plays back into the player-driven risk taking of dungeon diving.

If you want to thoroughly old-schoolify your D&D games... I think you have to play another system. Maybe try Old School Essentials. But you can go some way to a vibrant sort of middle ground with variations on this homebrew item, with optional rules actually found in the rules themselves. It's kind of strange to me that the latter are buried in faraway section as an afterthought, rather than being explicitly one among several default options. And don't pay any attention to anyone saying the gritty realism rules make dungeon crawling difficult or unfun - for my money, they're about only way to make occupational dungeon crawling work properly in 5e, because of everything discussed above. And your cleric will thank you.