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In my Player's Handbook for DnD 4e, the Hospitaller Paladin's Healing Font daily power has the following effect:

Effect: Until the end of this encounter, when you attack on your turn and hit at least one enemy, you heal an ally. Choose one ally within 10 squares of you. That ally regains a number of hit points equal to 1d6 [ts] your Wisdom modifier.

I don't recall seeing the [ts] notation elsewhere in the Player's Handbook. What does it mean or is it an error?

I did take a look at 4e errata downloaded from previous edition support but it doesn't change the Hospitaller ability.

kviiri
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1 Answers1

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In Healing Font's online Compendium entry, [ts] was changed to be "x," with the following notation:

Revision (7/28/2008)
Replace "[ts]" with "x" in last sentence of Effect text.

So if [ts] stands for [times] that'd mean it's 1d6 x Wis on each successful hit. This makes some sense from a technical perspective; draft manuscripts often use bracketed phrases for symbols and variables, which would later be changed out with a search-and-replace function. I've seen bracketed phrases get missed in the search-and-replace before, this is what that looks like (source: I work with book layout in my day job and I've also seen a number of RPG beta manuscripts).

But from a mechanical perspective, I find this nonsensical. Multiplying a die by a modifier is almost completely unprecedented in the annals of 4e, because it's far too uncontrolled for 4e's philosophy: at level 12 when the power's picked up, we're talking about something like a range of (with common assumptions about stat choices and depending on whether it's a secondary or tertiary stat) 3 to 18 or 5 to 30 healing and very little in 4e swings so unreliably--especially not heals. The size of large-number heals is usually determined by healing surge value, even when healing surges aren't actually being spent, to make sure a large heal is tailored to the target: sufficient but not wasteful. And every healing feature I've ever seen makes it clear to the user whether the heal will be large or small so it can be used effectively. Maybe this "dice times mod heal" thing is a PHB1 fluke where they hadn't quite figured out how they wanted the system to feel yet?

I'd be inclined to talk with my players about houseruling it as "plus" in my games. 1d6 + Wis on every successful hit for the rest of combat is still worthy of a daily power, and in line with how I've come to expect the system to work. (Hospitaler is a sky-blue PP either way, a healing powerhouse by virtue of its non-power features alone.)

BESW
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