am181d
Adventurer
Well, not ALWAYS, right? You just need to do 10 extra points of damage. I've fudged plenty of rolls for my players over the years so that the ogre would "only" take them down to -7 or -8...
L&L 5/21 - Hit Points, Our Old Friend
Well, not ALWAYS, right? You just need to do 10 extra points of damage. I've fudged plenty of rolls for my players over the years so that the ogre would "only" take them down to -7 or -8...
Bedrockgames
Legend
It is a fine design goal. But achieving the goal is going to have its own cost. I agree that some people saw the importance of clerics as a problem, but others just accepted it as a reality of the game's physics (if you didn't have a cleric the game played differently but that was a feature, not a bug). So my point isn't that you don't have a right to argue this was a problem and it should be fixed. It is simply that they might lose some of the people they are trying to win back if this fix is a core part of the game (but maybe not depending on how it is done).
Doug McCrae
Legend
Why not change the rule to death at minus 20 or something?
Viking Bastard
Adventurer
A couple of important aspects of healing that haven't been addressed by WOTC are resource recharge rates, and the huge difference between
parties with and without a healer. The article didn't mention the recharge rate of hit dice. A fast hit die recovery rate means characters
will almost always be fully healed, just as they have been when healing characters are in the party. Both a fast hit die recovery rate and
healers in the party make lasting injuries non-existent without house rules. Many, including me, do not like this. Having lasting
injuries/wounds/low-HP allows for great narrative. WOTC needs to allow for this style of play.
I'm in favor of slower recovery of HP with and without the presence of healing classes. I don't mind party's being able to handle multiple
combat encounters per day, but they shouldn't always pop right back up the next day after having having several encounters the previous day,
where their HP and resource were taxed. It's just goofy to me and lessons the impact of a sequence of tough combat encounters.
Next is resource recharging. Having resource recharge on a daily cycle makes for resource management (HP/spells/powers/etc) in overland
adventure campaigns meaningless. Infrequent combat encounters, typical in these types of campaigns, become trivialized unless they are
extremely hard on the party. It's not always desirable to have very hard single encounters just to challenge the party during overland
travels, or in campaigns with infrequent encounters. WOTC needs to address this as well.
The above go hand in hand, both of these related to resource recharge rates. I hope resources in DNDN at least have an option for, as
another poster wonderfully put, "gritty" options for recharge rates, allowing for lasting injuries and resource wear for campaigns that don't
always have multiple combat encounters per day.
parties with and without a healer. The article didn't mention the recharge rate of hit dice. A fast hit die recovery rate means characters
will almost always be fully healed, just as they have been when healing characters are in the party. Both a fast hit die recovery rate and
healers in the party make lasting injuries non-existent without house rules. Many, including me, do not like this. Having lasting
injuries/wounds/low-HP allows for great narrative. WOTC needs to allow for this style of play.
I'm in favor of slower recovery of HP with and without the presence of healing classes. I don't mind party's being able to handle multiple
combat encounters per day, but they shouldn't always pop right back up the next day after having having several encounters the previous day,
where their HP and resource were taxed. It's just goofy to me and lessons the impact of a sequence of tough combat encounters.
Next is resource recharging. Having resource recharge on a daily cycle makes for resource management (HP/spells/powers/etc) in overland
adventure campaigns meaningless. Infrequent combat encounters, typical in these types of campaigns, become trivialized unless they are
extremely hard on the party. It's not always desirable to have very hard single encounters just to challenge the party during overland
travels, or in campaigns with infrequent encounters. WOTC needs to address this as well.
The above go hand in hand, both of these related to resource recharge rates. I hope resources in DNDN at least have an option for, as
another poster wonderfully put, "gritty" options for recharge rates, allowing for lasting injuries and resource wear for campaigns that don't
always have multiple combat encounters per day.
Doug McCrae
Legend
That's because rpgers are a lot manlier now than they were in the 70s. I blame long hair, glam rock, disco and arcade games.
Falling Icicle
Adventurer
I'm not at all happy with this article. First off, I really, really hope that we're not going back to rolling for hit points. Worst. Mechanic. Ever. It also seems that we're back to HP scaling multiplicatively, which leads to the stupidity of low level characters having single digit HPs and massive HP bloat at higher levels. It also leads to many things becoming obsolete at high levels like alchemist fire, which really shouldn't. Why should an experienced hero laugh at having a jar of napalm thrown in his face? And that's what he will do, when some poor fool wastes his turn on a piddly 1d6 damage attack at that level. Likewise, the 5d6 fireball is now more pathetic than ever. Sure, you can prepare that fireball in a higher level slot to do more damage, but why should you have to? If orcs and other low level monsters are supposed to remain credible threats throughout the game, then so should alchemist's fire and 3rd level fireballs.
I was really hoping they were going to dramatically scale the rate of HP gain back in this edition, as their early comments indicated. If they did, we wouldn't really need to have to jump through so many hoops to explain away the blatant unrealistic nature of HPs. Sure, they're going to be an "abstraction" either way, but they're a heck of alot more believable if characters don't have 20 times the number of HP at 20th level that they had at level 1.
As for non-magical healing, I don't really have a problem with that. I agree that being able to have an effective party without a cleric is a highly desirable goal. But this HD system just comes across as contrived and overly crunchy. Just let munane characters restore a % of their HP with each rest or something similary simple.
I was really hoping they were going to dramatically scale the rate of HP gain back in this edition, as their early comments indicated. If they did, we wouldn't really need to have to jump through so many hoops to explain away the blatant unrealistic nature of HPs. Sure, they're going to be an "abstraction" either way, but they're a heck of alot more believable if characters don't have 20 times the number of HP at 20th level that they had at level 1.
As for non-magical healing, I don't really have a problem with that. I agree that being able to have an effective party without a cleric is a highly desirable goal. But this HD system just comes across as contrived and overly crunchy. Just let munane characters restore a % of their HP with each rest or something similary simple.
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Whether it ultimately survives the playtest or not, WOTC has put a lot of thought into this mechanic. Lets take a look at some of the simple beauty:
1) Its modular. Because it is not tied to magical healing or combat healing, DMs can modify it without having too large an impact on the game.
Don't like the mechanic, then drop it. You need your clerics or buckets of healing potion, but the game moves on no problem.
Not enough, bump it up. Combat healing remains the same, but your party can take on more encounters without running out of juice.
2) Provides randomness without being too random. People love to roll, but overall hitpoints are too important to leave to chance. However, recovery is more granular, and particular good/bad rolls don't have the same measured impact.
On the other hand, players can use average values to regain the consistency of healing surges should they choose to.
3) Better flavor. I never minded surges myself, but I understand the concern with those that do. By separating this mechanic from in combat healing we can separate the mundane and magical flavor.
A person can now recover from their wounds in part by resting, but in the short rest way that dnd adventurers typically assume. However, this mundane healing has its limitations (and seems to provide 1.5 - 2x the pcs normal longevity, as opposed to 3-4x for a 4e character).
Overall it seems like a good compromise to me, but again the key is by making the mechanic modular enough, DMs do it with as they please. While they could do the same with healing surges, it affected a lot more.
One thing I am confused about though. The article went into a lot of detail about how 1/2 HP means true wounds and the like, but I didn't see any mechanics to support that. For example, this Hit Dice healing doesn't seem impacted by whether I'm healing at 90% full or 10%.
1) Its modular. Because it is not tied to magical healing or combat healing, DMs can modify it without having too large an impact on the game.
Don't like the mechanic, then drop it. You need your clerics or buckets of healing potion, but the game moves on no problem.
Not enough, bump it up. Combat healing remains the same, but your party can take on more encounters without running out of juice.
2) Provides randomness without being too random. People love to roll, but overall hitpoints are too important to leave to chance. However, recovery is more granular, and particular good/bad rolls don't have the same measured impact.
On the other hand, players can use average values to regain the consistency of healing surges should they choose to.
3) Better flavor. I never minded surges myself, but I understand the concern with those that do. By separating this mechanic from in combat healing we can separate the mundane and magical flavor.
A person can now recover from their wounds in part by resting, but in the short rest way that dnd adventurers typically assume. However, this mundane healing has its limitations (and seems to provide 1.5 - 2x the pcs normal longevity, as opposed to 3-4x for a 4e character).
Overall it seems like a good compromise to me, but again the key is by making the mechanic modular enough, DMs do it with as they please. While they could do the same with healing surges, it affected a lot more.
One thing I am confused about though. The article went into a lot of detail about how 1/2 HP means true wounds and the like, but I didn't see any mechanics to support that. For example, this Hit Dice healing doesn't seem impacted by whether I'm healing at 90% full or 10%.
Steely_Dan
First Post
Sorry to come in at the last second, but does this mean that if you're a 5th level Fighter with 5 d10 HD, after a night's rest you roll 5d10 HP healing?
