L&L 5/21 - Hit Points, Our Old Friend

[nnms]

So monster math is tied to PC numbers, but a monster's level is something that is assumed to be a specific number.

I'm not really satisfied with this approach as long as the stats of a monster are a function of it's level and role/type rather than it's fictional description. At a given level, everything about a monster can be only one of a handful of different stat blocks, then differentiated only by its powers. It doesn't matter if a goblin is naked or wearing full plate armour. It's AC is determined by it's level and role, fiction be damned.

FWIW, this is the way my experience with 4e has gone, and I'm pretty content with it.

The way 4E does it causes it to break down for me. Here's the MM3 math:

It forces you to make a monster fit into one of the categories/roles to produce stats at a given level. And the presumed rate that PC bonuses go up is absolutely identical to the monster progression.

Try this with 4E: Everyone stays at level 1. Use the monster math to level down all the monsters to within a few levels of 0. Play as usual and every ten encounters, give people the feats, powers and class features unlocked by level up, but non of the other bonuses.

4E has the illusion of an actual leveling system, but the % of HP you do with an average attack, the to-hit number needed, the die roll needed to meet a DC, none of it actually changes. It's all a farce.

Older versions of the game had monster HD as a rough guide to monster strength combined with dungeon level wandering monster charts and the assumption that a given monster may or may not be an appropriate challenge and that the response sometimes should be avoidance.

The other issue I have is the tactical encounter rather than a continual exploration-description mode of play.

 

[mlund]

But, there are not really LV 13 goblins. If you come up against some goblins when you're LV 13, you mop the floor with them -- they are LV 1 monsters, and they don't magically get better because the party does. Similarly, the critters your fighting at LV 13 may or may not be LV 13 themselves, but if they are, you couldn't face them at LV 1, and by LV 20, they'll be cakewalks.

Well, in 4E the same NPC/monster could be designed as an Elite Level 4 Goblin and come back up in the same campaign as a Standard Level 8 Goblin with minimal modifications (and the same XP budget). Surviving that he might even come back again as a Level 16 Minion Goblin later on. It's actually pretty elegant.

Meanwhile in 3E sentient races with individuals could gain class levels just like PCs. Random Goblin could have 5HP, escape the slaughter of adventurers, and start living on his own, seeking his revenge while leveling in rogue - maybe even getting an Assassin prestige class later.

Heck, even in 1st Ed AD&D Monstrous humanoids in large enough communities automatically produced a random number of chieftains, sub-chiefs, etc. with advanced hit dice and in the case of intelligent ones that even has Magic-Users and Clerics rolled for in there.

And then there are mobs / swarms. That's a great feature of 3E and 4E that allows the component parts that would've been low-level challenges overcome their original stat-line limitations to create a collective threat that doesn't automatically get cake-walked by PCs due to bad standard HP, AC, and Attack roll modifiers for the individual of the race.

Flexibility in presentation for the DM is the key. I love systems that give you mechanics to help support that sort of thing.

- Marty Lund

 

[pemerton]

Even these meta-game level designs of treasure control and giving a "screw you" to people listening at doors, the monster stats themselves were still based relatively on their fictional description. Rust monsters have the HP and AC they do because they have tough hides (but not too tough) rather than because the PCs happen to be level 7 or something when they finally fight one.

I'm not really satisfied with this approach as long as the stats of a monster are a function of it's level and role/type rather than it's fictional description. At a given level, everything about a monster can be only one of a handful of different stat blocks, then differentiated only by its powers.

I agree with you about the relationship between a rust monster, its hide and its AC in classic D&D compared to 4e. What this means in AD&D and B/X is that at low levels there is a fairly low hit rate by the PCs (many things have ACs in a range of 4 to 7, and that's somewhat hard for a low level PC to hit - 13+ on a d20 before mods), while at high levels there is a pretty high hit rate.

This is obviously very different from 4e, which is designed around a more-or-less constant hit rate, and has a whole condition-infliction sub-game going on which only works and makes sense with that more-or-less constant hit rate.

On this design issue, my personally least favourite edition is 3E, which invented the "natural armour bonus" to get scaling defences something akin to 4e (although I gather not quite as smooth), while pretending to have the tough-hide simulation of classic D&D. (I mean, when natural armour is tougher than a mithral breastplate, what the heck am I meant to be envisioning in the fiction?)

It doesn't matter if a goblin is naked or wearing full plate armour. It's AC is determined by it's level and role, fiction be damned.

But this I don't agree with - taking off its armour should cost it a level or two. (It's attack bonus drops as it has to fight more defensively to make up for it's lack of armour, and its hp drop because it's less resilient without full plate.)

Or, if you don't want to bother with the maths of this, then if its full plate is lost you have to narrate something else in to plug the gap (of course this raises issues about railroading, but that's another issue).

The 4e DMG says a bit about this (pp 174-75):

You can add equipment to a monster to make it a little more challenging . . .

Remember that a monster’s game statistics are set to be appropriate for its level. Thus, altering a monster’s attack, defense, or damage values is a lot like changing its level (see above). Avoid the temptation simply to give all your monsters better armor and weapons. . .

If you want to give a monster equipment that changes its attack, defense, or damage values by more than a point or so, consider also making those alterations as part of changing its level.​

More advice, and examples of this sort of thing in published adventures, would help.

4E has the illusion of an actual leveling system, but the % of HP you do with an average attack, the to-hit number needed, the die roll needed to meet a DC, none of it actually changes. It's all a farce.

Like I said above, I think this is a little harsh. The fiction changes. And in a game of shared exploration of an imaginary setting, that's far from irrelevant. (4e is something like a more byzantine version of HeroQuest revised's pass/fail cycle.)

The rulebooks - both PHB and DMG - even talk about this, in their discussion of the different tiers. Again, though, I think more could have been done to bring out the ways in which these changes in the fiction matter. And more could have been done to explain how paragon paths and epic destinies, which are key points of expressing these fictional developments on the character sheet, feed into skill challenge framing and resolution (eg in persuading the duke, surely it makes a difference whether you're a Questing Knight, a Battlefield Archer or a Demonskin Adept - just to point to 3 of the PCs in my own game).

My own impression - and it's really nothing more than a gut feel based on reading these boards for a few years - is that a lot of people play 4e without treating the fiction as anything but colour. WotC's 4e modules tend to give this vibe. When the fiction becomes mere colour, and levelling is not a reward (for the reasons you give), and so action resolution becomes an end in itself, then accusations of "tactical skirmish game", "boardgame" and of being farcical do have some force, in my view.

It can create problems when you don't have tactical combat as a discrete game mode that you enter and exit. Replaying through Keep on the Borderlands with BECMI has definitely been an eye opener. Between wandering monsters and staying the exploration game mode for much of the build up to combat means managing HP across multiple encounters becomes the focus rather than within the individual tactical combats.

Before I switched to playing BECMI, I had done some serious rules hacking of 4E to get it to produce the type of play I was looking for. Given the difficulty of excising the pacing mechanic and revamping the refresh rates based on encounter or daily power usage, healing surges, etc., I'm not sure D&D Next can support both a OD&D/BECMI/1E style approach to resources and a 4E one, even with modules added or removed.

The other issue I have is the tactical encounter rather than a continual exploration-description mode of play.

At least in my view, 4e is pretty clearly designed for a "scene framing" approach, rather than a continuous exploration approach, to play. And on that I think we're in agreement. (Although I think it doesn't have to be tactical encounter. There are also skill challenges. And even semi-free-form exploration can be done in a scene-frame-y sort of way, in my experience. But these minor quibbles don't detract from the broader point.)

I think we also agree that the features of 4e that make it support its approach - like the constant hit rate in combat, the condition-infliction subgame, encounter powers, healing surges, no long duration effects, etc - are all at odds with continuous exploration, precisely because they confine the significance of events to the scenes in which they are framed, or their implications for newly-framed scenes.

Can D&Dnext somehow support both? I agree it's tricky. But look at Burning Wheel. Take out Let it Ride, take out the Intent and Task guidelines, and you've got something that looks a bit like a dice pool variant of Runequest. That might still be a pretty playable game.

Now I think that 4e and classic D&D are even more different than BW and this imaginary BW variant - but I still think this shows that the task isn't necessarily hopeless, provided the designers can find just the right points in the design where a subtle nudge, the doesn't change any of the raw numbers too much, can make a big difference in the way those numbers feed into action resolution and its consequences.

 

[nnms]

On this design issue, my personally least favourite edition is 3E, which invented the "natural armour bonus" to get scaling defences something akin to 4e (although I gather not quite as smooth), while pretending to have the tough-hide simulation of classic D&D. (I mean, when natural armour is tougher than a mithral breastplate, what the heck am I meant to be envisioning in the fiction?)

I definitely agree with this. 3.x frustrated me to the point of quitting D&D for about 8 years (fortunately, that freed up time for games like My Life With Master, DitV, Nine Worlds, Fudge/FATE, etc.,).

The 4e DMG says a bit about this (pp 174-75):

You can add equipment to a monster to make it a little more challenging . . .

Remember that a monster’s game statistics are set to be appropriate for its level. Thus, altering a monster’s attack, defense, or damage values is a lot like changing its level (see above). Avoid the temptation simply to give all your monsters better armor and weapons. . .

If you want to give a monster equipment that changes its attack, defense, or damage values by more than a point or so, consider also making those alterations as part of changing its level.​

More advice, and examples of this sort of thing in published adventures, would help.

My point in bringing this issue up is that while it may be somewhat talked about in the DMG, the published monster statblocks completely disregarded the equipment the creature had, what it was wearing, what it was using etc.,.

My own impression - and it's really nothing more than a gut feel based on reading these boards for a few years - is that a lot of people play 4e without treating the fiction as anything but colour. WotC's 4e modules tend to give this vibe. When the fiction becomes mere colour, and levelling is not a reward (for the reasons you give), and so action resolution becomes an end in itself, then accusations of "tactical skirmish game", "boardgame" and of being farcical do have some force, in my view.

The main problem with fiction in combat is that it rarely has an input into the mechanics. So all it really does is add time to each person's combat turn why they describe what a given at-will or encounter attack power looked like.

When i ran 4E, it was with explicit scene framing and no DM made plot. It was all improv off of player character goals. Even then, we still found that the combat mode made fiction descriptions unnecessary at best and a time waster at worst. We found it far better to have someone make a specific colour description at the end of each combat. Sort of using 4E combat to produce "story after."

At least in my view, 4e is pretty clearly designed for a "scene framing" approach, rather than a continuous exploration approach, to play. And on that I think we're in agreement. (Although I think it doesn't have to be tactical encounter. There are also skill challenges. And even semi-free-form exploration can be done in a scene-frame-y sort of way, in my experience. But these minor quibbles don't detract from the broader point.)

I do agree. My issue is that I'm just so tired of it. And how I found the tactical encounter based combat system doesn't produce meaningful outputs. It basically does 1) everyone expends some healing surges and maybe a daily power, 2) a PC dies, or 3) TPK. I managed to get a bit more out of it, but I found it took a lot of work to avoid the "everything is contained in the encounter area & time frame" approach of 4E combat.

I think we also agree that the features of 4e that make it support its approach ... are all at odds with continuous exploration, precisely because they confine the significance of events to the scenes in which they are framed, or their implications for newly-framed scenes.

This is exactly what I'm talking about.

Now I think that 4e and classic D&D are even more different than BW and this imaginary BW variant - but I still think this shows that the task isn't necessarily hopeless, provided the designers can find just the right points in the design where a subtle nudge, the doesn't change any of the raw numbers too much, can make a big difference in the way those numbers feed into action resolution and its consequences.

The key to making 4E work for continuous exploration type games was butchering the refresh rates, getting rid of the short rest and drastically changing healing, surges, etc.,. Oh, and dumping the XP budget, the pacing mechanic and the guidelines for encounter and monster design.

Pretty much the rest of the system could stay intact , but it was a big change from the players' perspective. Enough that we ended up just switching to basic D&D.

 

[tomBitonti]

What I got from the article (my quick stream of consciousness):

"It's important to note that Hit Dice come into play to represent mundane healing. Potions and spells restore hit points and ignore Hit Dice. If a character relies on natural healing, it takes quite a while to recover.

"When a character rests for an extended period of time, he or she regains Hit Dice. In other words, a longer rest allows your character to regain Hit Dice. Shorter rests allow you to spend those Hit Dice to regain your character's hit points.

Character state:

Hit Point (HP) Normal Maximum
Hit Point Current (varies from the maximum to 0; special conditions apply at 0 and below)

Hit Dice Maximum (presumed to be equal to the character level)
Hit Dice Current (varies from the maximum to 0; never below 0)

Hit points are proportional to hit dice with a multiplier (perhaps varying, for example, a fighter using a scaling factor of 10 and gaining 1D10 + Con Bonus per level; lots of room to adjust for higher or lower power levels)

Hit points are lost due to stress, exertion, or injury.
Hit points cannot be regained through normal means without rest.
Hit points may be recovered during rests of 10 minutes or more, using a similar scaling factor as for hit points, by expending hit dice.

Hit dice are lost (spent) during short rests to recover hit points.
A short rest is, say, ten (10) minutes or more.

Hit dice may be recovered during extended rests. Extended rests are, say, four (4) hours or more, or perhaps over night.

Unknown details:

Do players have the same number of hit dice as their character level?

The scaling factor varies per character class, but the exact factor per class is not known.

If the maximum hit dice were spent, what proportion of the maximum
hit points would be recovered?

How many hit dice are recovered during an extended rest? The text suggests that several extended rests are required to recover all hit dice; that suggests a low number, perhaps just one (1).

Additional questions:

Does this capture enough of the "feel" of D&D? How well does it capture
the style of the several editions?

How are hit points and hit dice narrated?

Is hit dice management "fun" for players? (Does it mean that all players have to micromanage their dice, where-as, that was more the cleric's role, and as a result something that could be relegated to a player who enjoyed the task?)

How significant is the loss if in-combat non-magical recover / healing?

Thx!

TomB

 

[pemerton]

My point in bringing this issue up is that while it may be somewhat talked about in the DMG, the published monster statblocks completely disregarded the equipment the creature had, what it was wearing, what it was using etc.,.

Obviously I don't find this sort of problem to be as widespread or jarring as you. But even I agree in respect of some monsters - especially some of the epic-tier humanoids introduced in MM3 (the Weavers and the like) which don't really seem to have the fictional context to warrant their extraordinary stats. (They remind me a bit of the Watchers and the like from the Marvel Universe.)

And I definitely agree that published material doesn't pay enough attention to things like delevelling strategies by depriving foes of equipment.

The main problem with fiction in combat is that it rarely has an input into the mechanics. So all it really does is add time to each person's combat turn why they describe what a given at-will or encounter attack power looked like.

<snip>

the combat mode made fiction descriptions unnecessary at best and a time waster at worst. We found it far better to have someone make a specific colour description at the end of each combat. Sort of using 4E combat to produce "story after."

I agree that fictional positioning has limited points of input.

I think the published rules tend to overlook or underemphasise some key ones, though - keywords in particular (eg fireball sets things alight because it's a [fire] power).

And geography is another thing that matters, obviously - and the way I use geography in encounters has really changed in 4e.

But the other, and more important way, that I try and use fiction is at the motivational/"framing" level - ie there are no relationship mechanics or augments, but you can get something like the same effect if you set up situations in which the fighter PC has a fictional, contextual reason to go one-on-one against his nemesis, the imp has a reason to single the sorcerer PC out for taunting and attack, etc. (To use another comics comparison, it becomes a bit like a group supers fight.)

In a sense this can be done in any system, but I find 4e especially good because it puts more of the action and tension into the fight itself rather than the prep (as in buff-style play, which I've had a lot of in Rolemaster), and also because I find it pretty forgiving of a certain degree of party looseness (we haven't experienced any strong focus-fire imperative in our game). And its PC build rules inject a decent amount of baseline fictional context (I'm a dwarf, so a former slave of the giants, so an enemy of the primordials and beloved by Moradin, etc) which this sort of context for conflict can then be hung on.


I don't know if that makes any sense.

I found the tactical encounter based combat system doesn't produce meaningful outputs.

Again, for my group the meaning has to be found in the broader context - both the story significance of what happened during the combat, and then the consequences of it afterwards. One upshot of this is "no filler encounters" - which is already a bit of a departure from traditional exploratory D&D.

Pretty much the rest of the system could stay intact

Like your smiley says, they're going to have to find an approach more robust than this to make D&Dnext work across the styles!

 

[nnms]

And I definitely agree that published material doesn't pay enough attention to things like delevelling strategies by depriving foes of equipment.

It's more than that. if you take a look at the monster math, a 1st level monster has 15 AC. Based on what? The armour it's wearing? The dexterity bonus it has? A half level bonus to defenses? What if I have one soldier with a dex of 10 in chain and another in plate & shield? They both have 17.

But I guess I've probably harped on about the design method being divorced from the fictional characteristics of the monster enough. 4E monster design is about producing results that fit into the whole encounter design/tactical combat system. It doesn't prioritize representing the fictional characteristics of the monsters.

I think the published rules tend to overlook or underemphasise some key ones, though - keywords in particular (eg fireball sets things alight because it's a [fire] power).

That sounds like a great declaration to make after invoking an aspect of the fireball. That'll cost me a Fate point though, won't it?

And geography is another thing that matters, obviously - and the way I use geography in encounters has really changed in 4e.

With everything being so improv based in my campaigns, I did my best to come up with cool battlefields on the fly, but I probably didn't do anything truly innovative.

In a sense this can be done in any system, but I find 4e especially good because it puts more of the action and tension into the fight itself rather than the prep (as in buff-style play, which I've had a lot of in Rolemaster),

I found the players cared about the combats because they only happened when they tried to go after their goals and got violent (or met violent opposition). The times that bored me to tears was when I played and it was either a module or a set of tactical encounters loosely connected with other game modes that was only really designed to justify the next tactical encounter. But that can happen in any RPG.

and also because I find it pretty forgiving of a certain degree of party looseness (we haven't experienced any strong focus-fire imperative in our game).

All of the players I played with are also miniature wargamers and quickly found the best tactics to dispatch foes quickly (like concentrating fire). I had to level up encounters quite a bit from the recommended distribution around their level.

And its PC build rules inject a decent amount of baseline fictional context (I'm a dwarf, so a former slave of the giants, so an enemy of the primordials and beloved by Moradin, etc) which this sort of context for conflict can then be hung on.

We always wanted different content for player buy in. If a player had a human cleric of some civilization/order based god, they'd often have goals like "start a central bank" or "take down the organized crime boss/thieves guild" or "drive the orc horde away in a lasting manner." We never played in the implied setting/Nentir Vale, so the default setting elements got chucked pretty fast.

Again, for my group the meaning has to be found in the broader context - both the story significance of what happened during the combat, and then the consequences of it afterwards. One upshot of this is "no filler encounters" - which is already a bit of a departure from traditional exploratory D&D.

From going from a 4E game where the players initiate all goals and quests to a exploratory playing of Keep On The Borderlands in Mentzer basic D&D, I know what you mean. Though I've started to appreciate "filler encounters" as being part of the process of being in a dangerous environment. And given that a combat can be over in five minutes rather than the length of a 4E encounter, it's not the same was wasting a big part of a session on a 4E filler encounter. Encounter length is another area where appealing both to 4E and pre-3.x style play with D&DN will be difficult.

Like your smiley says, they're going to have to find an approach more robust than this to make D&Dnext work across the styles!

I think the worst case would be a mishmash hybrid that doesn't do either the scene framing friendly approach or the exploratory approach particularly well.

Despite 4E's strengths, something about it as a product isn't working for WotC. So I think it's probably a fair bet that things that are iconic 4E elements might have a higher chance of not being around than staying. So my guess is that they'll start with the exploration focus and add more 4E style combat rules and refresh mechanics as modules than go the other way around.

 

[Stalker0]

If every hit is a near miss, then poisons just don't work.

An interesting idea, make poisons much stronger than they are now, but they only affect someone who is at half hp or less....to indicate a hit that is in fact a hit.

 

[FireLance]

It's more than that. if you take a look at the monster math, a 1st level monster has 15 AC. Based on what? The armour it's wearing? The dexterity bonus it has? A half level bonus to defenses? What if I have one soldier with a dex of 10 in chain and another in plate & shield? They both have 17.

A bit of an aside, but lately, I've been thinking that the relationship between AC and level ought to be reversed. A monster shouldn't have AC 15 because it's level 1. Rather, it should be level 1 because it has AC 15.

I'm picking on AC because it should be the most commonly attacked defence, and (IMO) probably the most important factor that determines the PCs' ability to overcome the monster is how easily they are able to hit it (let's set aside the ability to damage it for now). Factors like hit points influence how long the PCs will take to defeat it, and factors like the monster's attacks (type, bonus, damage) affect how long the PCs can take before the monster kills them, but (again IMO) the best single number on which to base an assessment of encounter difficulty is how easily the PCs are able to hit the monster.

What this means is, if you dress up a level 1 goblin that normally has AC 15 in plate mail and shield so that its AC is now 20, you've turned it into a level 6 monster. It might have the same hit points, attack bonus and damage (and this should be accounted for by adjusting the "standard" experience award for defeating a level 6 monster downwards) but calling it a level 6 monster makes the answer to questions like, "Why do my level 1 PCs have difficulty defeating level 1 goblins in plate mail?" pretty darn obvious.

 

[nnms]

A bit of an aside, but lately, I've been thinking that the relationship between AC and level ought to be reversed. A monster shouldn't have AC 15 because it's level 1. Rather, it should be level 1 because it has AC 15.

Yes!

This is a great approach for both having a monster built based on its fictional characteristics and neatly codified into a level for encounter building.

I'm picking on AC because it should be the most commonly attacked defence, and (IMO) probably the most important factor that determines the PCs' ability to overcome the monster is how easily they are able to hit it (let's set aside the ability to damage it for now). Factors like hit points influence how long the PCs will take to defeat it, and factors like the monster's attacks (type, bonus, damage) affect how long the PCs can take before the monster kills them, but (again IMO) the best single number on which to base an assessment of encounter difficulty is how easily the PCs are able to hit the monster.

It could probably be a weighted assessment. I think how dangerous a monster is to the PCs matters quite a lot as well.

What this means is, if you dress up a level 1 goblin that normally has AC 15 in plate mail and shield so that its AC is now 20, you've turned it into a level 6 monster. It might have the same hit points, attack bonus and damage (and this should be accounted for by adjusting the "standard" experience award for defeating a level 6 monster downwards) but calling it a level 6 monster makes the answer to questions like, "Why do my level 1 PCs have difficulty defeating level 1 goblins in plate mail?" pretty darn obvious.

I think some of the vagaries could be made precise for such a system, but in general I like this approach.

This is actually a lot like the HD plus that older versions of D&D used. If something was 2 HD, but it had a lot of special abilities, it would both be worth more xp and be marked as more than just a 2 HD creature. I think some versions had a star beside the HD, others had a +X. Others had a note that it counted as a higher HD.

Combine this with a flattened power curve where you don't have monsters with massive numbers in their defenses, attack rolls, hp, etc., and we could have the basis for a system that could support both a tactical encounter and scene framing style of play alongside a continuous exploration approach.