[David Bofinger]

Originally Posted by Skarg

if you're confident that no one important will die if you fight some weaker foes, but there's still a chance some of you will take some moderate injury that will take time to heal or else make tougher fights more dangerous in future, then that makes the lesser fights into interesting calculated risks where the way you manage risk is still possibly going to make a big difference. (This, it seems to me, is one of the main elements of play in all of the MicroQuests.)

I guess there's more than two scenarios for healing:

1. When you need healing, you can't have it. The PCs start uninjured, gradually accumulate wounds and hope to make the finish line before they (all) die. Fights are severe enough to make this challenging, which means that no individual fight has much chance to defeat the players, unless they are already badly injured near the end of the quest. Problem with this is that the PCs might do badly early on, take a lot of wounds and be doomed, but not know it. The GM can fudge it by providing healing potions in the treasure, assuming there is a GM and the system includes healing potions. Also the fights are never severe enough there's a risk of losing, which takes a good deal of the tension out of them.
2. You can get healed by stopping and doing nothing for a long time. The fights might be tough enough to be threatening, in which case there are lots of wounds and the campaign becomes very slow in game time. Or they are easy enough people don't get seriously hurt, in which case there's not much tension.
3. You can get healed easily, after every fight, with a short pause. The fights are tough enough to be threatening. Injuries become a short-term problem. I don't see a problem here, but some people are offended, maybe by failure of suspension of disbelief?
4. You can get healed easily, either after a fight or during if the healer can keep up. Fights are even tougher, to be challenging. I don't see a problem here.

TFT as originally published is 2, except some MicroQuests might be 1. TFT with the proposed healing spell would be something between 2 and 3 (lots of resting). D&D is a hybrid of something between 2 and 3 (clerics take a night to get their spells back) and 4.

The key point is that as healing gets better it becomes practical to make the monsters more powerful, so simplistic ideas like "healing makes the players better off" don't apply.

But if healing is fast and trivial, then that consideration is removed, making both the easy fights and the harder fights, as well as the combined experience, less interesting.

I don't find bottom line concerns ("Am I kiling things fast enough to keep up with the healing bill?") An interesting way to play. It seems more of a wargaming thing and less a role-playing thing.