I was recently thinking about healing.

There’s been a lot of discussion over the years on how and how much healing should be allowed in our games. For this one, I will focus more on D&D. That’s because there are various genres and games that have very specific rules regarding healing and how they are limited due to the nature of the game.

Healing is relatively easy in 5e, especially out of combat. In a game where the majority of the rules, and usually the game time as well, focus on combat, it would be weird not to have easy healing options. Sure, there are alternate rules to make things harder. But they are alternate rules for a reason. The majority of a session is spent on hitting stuff. If you are out of juice, you cannot do that.

I was thinking about this because of the Slay the Spire board game. The game features 3 acts, with a boss at the end of each act. During an act, you face multiple encounters. While the encounters vary, I think most of them are combat encounters. But on every act, the last encounter before the boss is a campfire where you can rest. And if you manage to beat the boss, you heal back up to max. Oh, by the way, if you are interested, we have reviewed it.

Now, am I going to compare D&D with a board game? Yes and no. Slay the Spire, the board game, is an adaptation of a video game of the roguelike genre. I could argue that roguelikes, along with other genres such as RPGs, wouldn’t exist if D&D did not exist. Of course, after half a century and multiple iterations, they may have a connection, but they are not the same thing. But in this case, both games focus on combat, and in both cases, they know when to be generous with healing.

As an “out of the box” version, D&D does its healing well because it’s like vanilla ice cream. Everyone likes it, and it’s widely available. But once you’ve tried it, you realise there are so many other flavours and you try the ones you think are more interesting.

I hope I managed to get what I wanted across. And that’s all for this prompt. The next one is going to be “sign”.

And until next time, have fun!

P.S.: You can find all of my posts for this year’s RPGaDay here. Thanks to AUTOCRATIK and Casting Shadows for hosting another year of the event.