D&D 4E Changing the Combat Parameters of 4th Edition

LostSoul said:

I left spells and prayers tied to a five minute rest*, and you could spend as many healing surges as you'd like during that time, but you'd need to spend a full day of nothing but rest to regain a healing surge.

Then I did some other things:

NPCs get tougher over time
XP isn't tied to killing monsters
Gaining levels takes a long time
Tied GP to time via "Get a Job"

I haven't played a PC in my game much, but it's a bitch to decide when to rest and when to head back out there.

* Exploits are different.

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Correct me if I am wrong, but you only allow the recovery of 1 HS after an extended rest, right? So a Fighter with 12 HS, would have to rest 12 Days to be fully recovered - or am I misinterpreting what you say? It would really slow down the level progress.
If I compare to real life I would say it takes 10 years to reach CEO level at a large company (my personal estimate). To reach divinity and godhood in 4th edition will take 2 months (2 extended rests for each new level, times 30 levels). In 5th Edition it is eaven shorter 33 Days - even though you might not reach divinity in the same sense as in 4th Edition at 20th level. With your rules applied you would at least multiply that time with 10, so becoming a god actually would take at least 600 days - almost 2 years - for a very ambitious adventurer set out to become a god. I like the thought of that longer period, but I am not sure the players would agree to it ;-) Would be a little like in the 1st edition days when you spent weeks healing between each visit to the dungeon.

HEALING CONCEPTS
Looking at healing I think if you restrict it too much it would lead to either less number of encounters per day, or forcing DM to reduce the monster level if you want to still keep the number of encounters, which might be negative for game play. It would be interesting to analyze how much healing power a cleric has for different levels, just in order to have an understanding of how much HS and HP the cleric can provide.

Here are some of the thoughts I have been considering:

1. Reduce the Healing Surge value to 1/6th of Max HP rather than 1/4th. I understand the beauty of 1/4th in the sense that it is easy to calculate in your head, but as leveling happens so seldom, maybe people could manage the calculation with the calculator on their phone?
2. Aim at 2 Short Rest during the adventuring day. Each one 1 hour long.
3. You can heal up to 2 Healing Surges during a Short Rest, and never more than 4 during a full day, i.e. natural healing and not magical healing that is initiated by the use of a power or magic item (the later two has no restriction).
4. One Second Wind can be used in each encounter and only while bloodied, and they only grant temporary HP to the PC, rather than healing. Any Temp HP not “used” by the end of the encounter is lost. I am also considering the use of an Endurance or CON check to see how many Temp HP you get from your HS (never more than the HS value).
5. You calculate negative HP. Any healing applied will have to also heal the negative HP before the PC gets above 0 hp and gets conscious.
6. Option 1: A Healer’s Kit can be used in combination with a Heal check to allow a person with negative HP to use a HS. The Heal check decides how much HP is recovered, up to the value of the HS, or the HP healing value of the Healer’s Kit. Better Healer’s Kit that can cure more dire wounds cost more and might be more rare.
7. Option 2: A Healer’s Kit must be applied during a short rest in order to be able to recover hit points. The Heal check decides how much HP is recovered, up to the value of the HS, or the HP healing value of the Healer’s Kit. Better Healer’s Kit that can cure more damage and cost more and might be more rare.
8. At an Extended Rest you may regain as much HP as you have remaining Healing Surges. No remaining Healing Surges - no healing. At the end of the Extended Rest you regain half of your Healing Surges, you may opt to use these for healing, but they then counts against the 4 you can use during a full day.

I have not started modelling this, they are just some ideas I am interested in analyzing. Any thoughts or suggestions?

Myrhdraak said:

Correct me if I am wrong, but you only allow the recovery of 1 HS after an extended rest, right? So a Fighter with 12 HS, would have to rest 12 Days to be fully recovered - or am I misinterpreting what you say? It would really slow down the level progress.

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One full day of rest, not just the overnight rest. You can't get back your daily powers either.

The real key to this is to make sure that time is part of the game's economy.

LostSoul said:

One full day of rest, not just the overnight rest. You can't get back your daily powers either.

The real key to this is to make sure that time is part of the game's economy.

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That's an interesting thought. I might have used time as a factor for travelling to certain destinations, or tied to puzzles or combat events, but never really considered the time for healing and recovery as a time factor you could use in the game. I you are set against the clock for some major game events, and healing takes long time, every damage you take would count.

Myrhdraak said:

That's an interesting thought. I might have used time as a factor for travelling to certain destinations, or tied to puzzles or combat events, but never really considered the time for healing and recovery as a time factor you could use in the game. I you are set against the clock for some major game events, and healing takes long time, every damage you take would count.

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IMHO the issue is that often the players have no control over this resource, or at least very little. Its quite easy to go into some fight, classically early in the day, and start rolling low and get the tar beat out of you. If you now have to cower somewhere for a week to recover from this the plot consequences are dire, and the GM generally resorts to either relaxing the healing constraint (usually by some handwavy good fortune) or simply ignoring the plot issue. This is especially a problem when you're running (or designing!) adventures for other people to run, where you have rather little control of or idea about the resourcefulness of the players, actual functional capability and toughness of the characters, etc.

Its not so bad if its a GM running a game, or one that has substantial player input into plot (like say something run along the lines of [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]), you can simply accept the vagaries of fate as an input to determining what happens next, but its pretty darn crummy when you're running G3 and the first random hellhound crisps half the party up real good.

Now I have been modelling some of the assumptions I did above. I have degrade the HS value to 1/6th of the Full HP. I have reduced the ability to heal to 2 HS during a short rest plus 1 HS of temp HP after a Second Wind. I also put the limit of HS you could recover after an Extended Rest to half, and you have to use any remaining HS value to regain HP from an Extended Rest. What is then the result? You find it below.

The first three staples show the first three battles and the HS value going into those rounds. Green bar shows the average healing capabilities of one cleric in the party (at 6th level with 5 players). As we can see is adventuring day quite well balanced against a foe of equal level to the party (also assuming three single encounters). The party is fully recovered after the extended rest (6+6=12 HS they started with the first day), but then the HS value for the second day would be 21/2=10.5 HS during the second day, limiting their abilities to take on tough challenges a second day in a row.



If we look at a monster one level higher than the party on average, the day is going to be much tougher.



We can now see that the party would have a tough time getting through the third encounter, even with some healing if they did not have other characters who had invested in some extra healing capabilities. The Party would only have 4.5 HS in HP rather than 12 after an extended rest and would need to use 7.5 or the 10.5 HS just to wake up with full HP, limiting the remaining HS the second day to 3 HS.

As we can see, this would be a much tougher environment than standard 4th Edition. Is it too tough?

One interesting effect we gets with these changes to the Healing and Recovery rules (by trying to mimic some of the changes that was done in 5th Edition) is that 4th Edition becomes less of the Epic game it set out to be (which some accused to be WoW inspired), and instead become more gritty - or realistic (depending on your own view of the game). Players will not recover and rise new and shiny after one night of rest, and be ready to repeat this day-after-day-after-day. As you can see in the graph below they can take on 3 encounters of equal monster level in a row and then take and extended rest. The next day they will be able to take on 2 encounters before the extended rest, and the third day maybe only 1 encounter before it is time to really consider heading back to town to regroup and recover for two days in a row.

We have turned the 5 encounters game day of 4th Edition into a 3+2 game days, thereby at least increasing the time to godhood from 2 months to 4 months ;-) and a very different recovery experience.



This might not fit your game style, but if it do, it is an interesting mechanism and it will most likely also make it easier to convert 5th Edition material to this "4.5 Edition", as it will follow very similar combat behaviours as in 5th Edition. However, some further analysis need to be done to verify the rules.

If we instead look at the adventuring day (still for our 6th Level Characters) but against different level of monsters we get the below graph. We can see that monsters of level 3 or lower than the adventuring party (M-3) is not really consuming any resources, at least not for Single Encounters. We will later look at multiple encounters in order to see how it works in those scenarios. We can also conclude that the party can handle monsters of one level higher than the party (M+1), but higher than that you start to get into trouble (in real game they might very well be able to handle higher level monsters because some multi-opponent powers deal more damage than single opponent powers, so the damage output could actually be bigger than what we are calculating on).

DOUBLE ENCOUNTER

So how does it look like when we have 3 x 2 encounters, i.e. 3 double encounters vs. a more simple foe before the characters can take an extended rest? In the graph below this is simulated. In order to be able to face the 6th encounter the enemies have to be 3 levels lower than the party (M-3). We see how the number of healing surges is almost used up after the last encounter, a higher level moster would have been dangerous in the last encounters. Another benefit is hat these encounters run shorter than traditional 4th Edition battles, lasting only 2.5 rounds on average.

TRIPLE ENCOUNTER

Last thing to check is how the 3 x 3 encounters, i.e. 3 triple encounters vs. an even simpler foe looks like. In the graph below this is simulated. In order to be able to face the encounter the enemies have to be 4 levels lower than the party (M-4). They would have survived a monster 3 levels lower as well, but then almost all Resources would be used (see second graph). These encounters run in 2.1 rounds, so they are not very tactical and more like a speed bump in the road, but nine of them have an impact during a day.





Conclusion
It looks like we have managed to create a healing and recovery baseline that more mimics the 5th edition implementation. We can run single encounters to runs just like normal 4th Edition tactical combat, but we can also mix in double or triple encounters before a short rest to achieve smaller and fast playing challenges, still using 4th Edition characters. Next step would be to look into the DM side of thing - how do we create an XP progression that mimics the individual monsters threat level good enough to allow us as a DM to more easily create a balanced encounter in this new play style?