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

Ameoboid said:

So really the only problem that I see and can't work through with the idea of "No Recovering Encounter Powers Until Short Rest" wave mechanic is at the low-level range when PCs only have 2-3 at a time. Now say that they are running through a 4 room dungeon, Short Rests take and hour and we are running this area as a full encounter in waves progression. Party of 3, each blows an encounter power in room 1, none in 2, each one in room 3. That leaves one guy with an encounter power and each with their daily for the "Boss" room. Works out fine there but any extra rooms/encounters tacked on before the short rest leave them with only At-Wills (which aren't bad to only have I know, it just doesn't give the feeling of 'Oomph' from Encounter Powers).

This isn't an issue per say, just an observation. I really like the idea itself, I am just trying to think of how to implement it at the very beginning so the players become used to it right off the bat, and letting them still feel capable, rather than switching down the line. (New group is starting up, running 4E for a bunch that have never played the edition)

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Well the idea here is to try to turn Healing Surges into some kind of "Stamina Surges" (or some other name to broaden its use) - a finite but useful resource. Another idea I have been playing with, which might address the issue you are pointing at is that except just using a 1 Staming Surge to regain all your encounter Powers at a Short Rest, you could potentially regain 1 Encounter Power anytime by using 1 Stamina Surge (ie. when not resting). Low level players who have few encounter Powers, and many stamina surges (many cases more than they have healing magic). Maybe you could even be allowing the ability to regain 1 Daily Power by using 2 Stamina Surges, but more analysis would probably have to be done to look at the consequenses in game play.

AbdulAlhazred said:

Suffering builds character!

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Suffering at least builds great encounters and great memories. I Think all my best D&D memories are those when the party is at the brink of utter despair, and manages to turn it around by smart tactics or a lucky roll. I would like to increase the frequency of those situations in 4th Edition by changing the resource system in some way - without having to bring in a lot of high level encounters to achieve it.

Myrhdraak said:

Well the idea here is to try to turn Healing Surges into some kind of "Stamina Surges" (or some other name to broaden its use) - a finite but useful resource. Another idea I have been playing with, which might address the issue you are pointing at is that except just using a 1 Staming Surge to regain all your encounter Powers at a Short Rest, you could potentially regain 1 Encounter Power anytime by using 1 Stamina Surge (ie. when not resting). Low level players who have few encounter Powers, and many stamina surges (many cases more than they have healing magic). Maybe you could even be allowing the ability to regain 1 Daily Power by using 2 Stamina Surges, but more analysis would probably have to be done to look at the consequenses in game play.

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Well, at the risk of being self-promoting... http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?508216-What-are-people-homebrewing&prefixid=wotc There's a link here to a PDF of HoML, which does a bunch of these kinds of things. Its a lot of text to wade through though, and the gist of it may not be obvious without excessive reading.

'Encounter' powers became 'Intermittent', they can be re-used by expending a Vitality Point (HS). Vitality powers replace Daily powers and outright always require a VP to access. Every character in HoML has 8 VP starting off, since it would be fairly hard to work a system of even resources if different classes had more or less VP. VPs might also do other things. They actually do replace AP as well, which I did away with for the sake of simplicity. I've considered whether VP might be recovered, maybe 1 per short rest potentially. This would mirror 4e's system of milestones, which kind of seemed a bit redundant.

A VP might also be useful in some other roles. For instance 4e had an interesting sub-mechanic they played with that I call 'binding', where you paid an HS every day to maintain some effect (Teleportation Circle was the main one). This could be extended to a lot of other things, though I haven't really experimented with that yet. For instance you could create bindings that worked to create certain item enchantments. Heck, that could be the PRIMARY way to enchant items, which might be a bit more interesting than 4e's "hey just cast this easy ritual and make anything" approach.

Ok, here come some more material from the analysis work. I have now implemented Bounded Accuracy into the mix in order to see how it plays out if I want to use monsters of lower levels than what you normally do in 4th Edition. So I simulated a party consisting of a Fighter and a Rogue and have combined their HP Resources (As max HP is equal to 4 HS, you can see in the graph below that 4+4=8 is the combined HP Resources of this "party"). I have then looked at how many HS remains after a typical Short Rest and what they have remaining after a full adventureing day (which is the blue line, which only appears if the number of HS runs out at the second Short Rest). I have simulated from a monster 5 levels lower than the party level, to a monster 3 levels higher than the party level.



The game has become deadlier, that the traditional 4th Edition. We now only have 2 short rests, rather than 4 during an adventuring day. The monster and character HP progression after first level have been reduced by 25%. Next step will be to see how Resources are allocated, i.e. will encounter and Daily Powers run out if we run the game in this mode, resulting in you getting stuck with endless At-Will Powers.
We then have to look how long the encounters are for various monster levels to calculate on this. Below you see the number of rounds needed to deafeat a monster of a particular level in relation to the party level (from Monster 5 level lower to Monster 3 level higher).



Encounter length seems to grow from 1.5 rounds up to roughly 3 rounds at higher levels, for simple foes. While for tough encounters with high level monsters, we are looking at 4 rounds up to 6 rounds, which is good. Traditional 4th Edition can for tough monsters have battles that run for 10 even 12 rounds if you simulate it like this (reality might be less as we cannot simulate all the complexities of a 4th Edition game, but at least it allow us to compare the effect of changing certain aspects of it).

AbdulAlhazred said:

Well, at the risk of being self-promoting... http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?508216-What-are-people-homebrewing&prefixid=wotc There's a link here to a PDF of HoML, which does a bunch of these kinds of things. Its a lot of text to wade through though, and the gist of it may not be obvious without excessive reading.

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Yes, I think it was one of those great sources that I read on these forums that got me thinking it would be interesting to analyze the effect of doing some of these changes.

I've been thinking that the main reason attrition doesn't work in 4e is the huge number of healing surges, every PC has around 3-4 times their base hp in healing per day. I've been looking at what the effect would be of cutting healing surges to 1/3 as many.

As far as I can see, this would not much affect the daily 'spike' encounter, because few PCs use more than 2-3 healing surges in a battle, but it would make any minor encounter attrition significant because spending a healing surge becomes a significant resource that could affect survival in future encounters that day.

Thoughts?

S'mon said:

I've been thinking that the main reason attrition doesn't work in 4e is the huge number of healing surges, every PC has around 3-4 times their base hp in healing per day. I've been looking at what the effect would be of cutting healing surges to 1/3 as many.

As far as I can see, this would not much affect the daily 'spike' encounter, because few PCs use more than 2-3 healing surges in a battle, but it would make any minor encounter attrition significant because spending a healing surge becomes a significant resource that could affect survival in future encounters that day.

Thoughts?

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I think this is what I am trying to establish the effect of by simulating things. If I compare to 5th Edition every character have 4 HS, and they only regain 2 of these HS after and extended rest. Drawback with this is that every character becomes the same. I like that 4th Edition have various roles in combat, and therefore embrace that they should be different for different classes. However, we can alwasy question the amount they have. A high-level fighter can have as many as 18 HS at Epic levels, which means he have not nine-lives like a cat, but at least 5 lives in a day. You could either take two paths here, one would be to cut HS values to half (that would at least get some none-defenders into a similar healing capability as in 5th Edition, while the defenders, would cut their ability down to maybe 4 lives in a day (at Epic levels). The other approach is to make Healing Surges into something that can be used for other things than just healing (Vitality Points as AbdulAlhazred have called them previously). My preference is the later as we then get into what D&D is really all about (as a game system) - resource management. Healing Surges become a finite resource that can be used for healing, but also other things. You as a player will have to weight the risk of combat vs. utility use of them.

Myrhdraak said:

I think this is what I am trying to establish the effect of by simulating things. If I compare to 5th Edition every character have 4 HS

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I think it's slightly worse than that - given magic/warlord boosts a 4e PC can typically get to full with 3 surges, while a 5e PC is not guaranteed to get back to full from 0 even with all hit dice. Hence my thinking to divide 4e surge numbers by 3 rather than by 2 to get a 5e type effect.

In his home Dark Sun game, to reproduce the gritty and dangerous feel of the setting, former WotC staffer Greg Bilsland reduced PC surges to 1 or 2: "I’m limiting characters’ healing surges to one or two. If a character is a defender, or if he or she has a class feature based on the use of healing surges, such as the druid from Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms, then a character has two healing surges. Otherwise, each character has only one healing surge."

https://gregbilsland.wordpress.com/2010/12/22/dark-sun-house-rules/

S'mon said:

I think it's slightly worse than that - given magic/warlord boosts a 4e PC can typically get to full with 3 surges, while a 5e PC is not guaranteed to get back to full from 0 even with all hit dice. Hence my thinking to divide 4e surge numbers by 3 rather than by 2 to get a 5e type effect.

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One idea I got that is a simple change but, which would result in higher HS usage would be to introduce negative HP, i.e. if I have 10 hp and takes 32 hp in damage I would actually have -22 hp and start rolling death saves. However, in order to heal, you have to use your healing surges to actually heal the negative HP as well. So if a healing surge gives you 20 hp, one healing surge would take you to -2 hp, and you need to apply a second HS to go to positive HP and get conscious. In game play this could actually have a quite big average effect on available healing surges.
I can understand that WotC have taken away negative numbers as the kids of today probably have not learnt simple math, but for us old-timers it might work well ;-)

You could then add other mechanisms as well. Maybe negative hit points can only be healed with magic or applying a healer's kit with a successful Heal skill check where the amount of negative HP in some way reduces the chance to heal, or the amount healing you get from a Healing Surge. Maybe one of the death save conditions would be to get stabalized but not regaining any HP. Without magic or a proper healer you could be lingering at death's door for days without getting better, as the short and extended rest only heals if you are a 1 hp or higher.

You could add a bloodied condition that grants enemies either combat advantage or a +2 chance to hit while bloodied. Damage dealt to you is +1[W] while bloodied. This will force players to use second wind earlier and thereby consume HS earlier in the battle, rather than waiting for the Short Rest.