Realism vs. Believability and the Design of HPs, Powers and Other Things

[Mercutio01]

[MENTION=87792]Neonchameleon[/MENTION] - We're down to opinions and personal feelings about the game now, which means a fundamental difference in how we play D&D, what we want out of D&D, and how we view various incarnations of D&D over the years. I've never felt that HP were broken. We are at an impasse. And 5E is supposed to bridge the gap between us. They have a ridiculously hard task to complete and I don't envy their position. I hope they can do it.

(Incidentally in 3.5, crafting wands requires the cleric to be level 5 and expend a valuable feat slot [of which they'd only have 3 if they were humans, 2 if any other race]. Then they need to spen one day, which means one full uninterrupted 8 hour day during which they cannot do anything else, requires the expenditure XP and raw materials, plus a wand "blank" on which to work, plus the expenditure of the spell in question. It can't be rushed and it sets back the crafter's experience delaying his next chance to level up. And that all means time not spent exploring dungeons, saving kingdoms, searching for lost treasures, etc. It's not as simple as "Hey, let's take a break in this dungeon to make a wand." or "Delay the assault on the castle as long as you can. I'm busy making this wand here.")

A cleric as a holy warrior with a mace? Off the top of my head, that's almost a thousand years old at a minimum. You might have the weight of 40 years of gaming. But against that we can set 30 years of gaming and almost a thousand years of history and stories.

And now comes out the "reality" argument, which holds absolutely zero weight because REAL clerics didn't cast spells at all. Drop the silliness.

And I care more that my game resembles good fiction than that it's self-referential.

So your "good fiction" involves nigh unkillable heroes who heal themselves simply by taking a five minute rest or sleeping one night and feeling magically completely normal? Not my definition of "good fiction" but to each their own.



EDIT: And I'm done arguing with you because it's completely apparent that neither side really groks the problems the other side has. Different experiences, different expectations, different desires, and different viewpoints, all of which are irreconcilable without differing rules to cater to each side. You're unwilling to take a step back, as you probably see it, and I think the step forward was no such thing, so I don't want to move away from what has worked since RPGs were created for a system that I just don't like, even after playing it for 2 years.

 

[Mercutio01]

Also - interestingly, Odo of Kent appears to have been a noncombatant who never actually engaged in combat and merely sat in the rear cheering the troops on. Which makes him sounds much less like a "holy warrior with a mace" than a "holy man providing hope [HP?] for disheartened troops without actually hitting anyone at all." Makes him sound more like a 4E warlord without combat skills.

Furthermore, the article you linked indicates that he was a corrupt extortionist who was fabulously wealthy by robbing the people he ruled, and that he even defrauded the king and was later imprisoned. Not who I'd hold up as a paragon of the cleric. Maybe a charlatan or an evil cloistered cleric or evangelist.

 

[Gorgoroth]

.

"The Wand of Cure Light Wounds does not take "a lot of time" to craft. It takes one day. If that's a lot of time in your games, I wonder that the PCs even have time to sleep. As for the cost? Under 400GP to craft? When a +1 sword is over 2000GP to buy?"

To me, this is merely a question of "Do we want cure light wounds to be craftable in a wand at such a wholesale price"...to which the answer must be a resounding No. If anything, it kills off clerics just as much as healing surges do. Let's make clerics reflavorable and fun to play, including combat, with whatever weapons their deities favor, and we can move on from there.

Rebalancing magic item creation costs must be done in any edition...hopefully they'll learn from that too. I didn't really agree with, say, Iron Armbands benefitting rangers twice as much as any other class for the same price (they should be 1 arm armbands. Want the damage benefit on both attacks? Buy two. This also kills the bird of "no other arm item slot for magic shields in S+B fighters, who'd also love to have armbands buff their sword arm).

There are a lot of good innovations in 4e, but we know where work needs to be done. Another example, to reply to NeonChameleon:

"But they aren't. They aren't back at full until their healing surges are restored. They are just able to function effectively, having been bandaged and having had their wounds stop bleeding. (Now the one night of rest issue is a genuine one). A bandaged wound isn't the same as a healed wound but it's a lot less of an inconvenience than an unbandaged one, especially to an action hero."

This skirts my other main point, that a level 1 hero with ten surges has over 100hp to soak up each and every day. This is more HP than almost any other character I've played, except for a level 10 synthesist in PF that was waaaay OP and nearly unkillable. Our Warden in our 4e campaign started acting so reckless and challenging the DM to drop him. He used his "when you go under 0hp"-triggered revival daily utility power, only once in two years, and that was on purpose.

There's a difference between action hero and Superman. If a wizard feels like superman (our wizard too, never spent his entire allowed surges in two years of gameplay), Houston, we have a problem.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Yes, in addition to the surges, which makes death (again, my play experience for 4E) so rare as to be nonexistent (as in, no character in any game I played in 4E has ever died) and thus the game felt stale and boring as there was never a real threat except for those that were ridiculously over-budget.

And we're off to another spurious complaint about 4e. Death is a theoretical threat in any version of D&D. In older versions, it was a very real, very arbitrary and random threat. In 3e and 4e, it's really not. Decent, obvious, strategies (rampant powergaming in 3e; a balanced party in 4e), greatly reduce the likelihood of death. I played in two long-running campaign in 3e and the same group continued with 4e. 1st to double-digit levels, twice each. One character death & resurrection in 3e. One in 4e. Both were considered failures by both the DM and the players.

Some DMs do set out to kill PCs, and I'm sure they find 4e's consistent encounter balance guidelines unsuitable - they just have to exceed those guidelines is all. Some PCs set out to kill eachother, and 4e's classes, balanced for contribution to the party rather than 1:1 duels is uniquely unsuited for that. 3e, OTOH, was better suited to PvP and PvDM styles.

5e will have to pull elements from both, and for older eds, if it's going to come up with modules to support both cooperative and competitive play styles.

That's what a DM is for.

To fix the broken game. Yeah, I know. It's kinda like older American cars. The great thing is you can work on them yourself. The problem is you really /need/ to, frequently.

A lot of the complaining I see about healing wands goes hand-in-hand with the complaints about magic Walmarts, neither of which were present in my games (neither as player, nor DM, nor in 3.0, nor 3.5). It seems that the two go together. Magic Walmarts lead to everyone with a wand lead to characters that die as often or even less than 4E superheroes.

Craft Wand was a 5th level feat. No 'magic Wal*Marts' are needed for the WoCLW to become a staple of between-combat healing. In fact, crafting was cheaper and more efficient.

 

[Tony Vargas]

To me, this is merely a question of "Do we want cure light wounds to be craftable in a wand at such a wholesale price"...to which the answer must be a resounding No. If anything, it kills off clerics just as much as healing surges do.

Setting aside that neither kills the Cleric at all, I'm glad you see the parallel.

This skirts my other main point, that a level 1 hero with ten surges has over 100hp to soak up each and every day. This is more HP than almost any other character I've played

Nod. And a WoCLW was a pool of ~275 hps, distributable to anyone in 1d8+1 dollops.

So the same 'problem' existed in both editions, but, really, what was this problem that "kills off clerics?"

In 4e, a cleric is able to trigger and enhance healing surges, and to provide non-surge healing if he cares to pick the right utilities. He can even take a 'pacifist' option which makes him an unparalleled healer, and discourages much attacking at all (mostly 'attacks' that just de-buff rather than doing damage). If the cleric player wants to take a more 'hands on' approach there's a fairly tough melee build, and a ranged controllerish one, as well. But, between combat, healing is just a matter of rest, so the cleric need only heal in-combat. The Cleric is a very viable option in 4e, a fully-contributing, balanced class, but it is an /option/, not a necessity. There are other sources of healing, and between-combat healing is almost a non-issue, though it does consume a daily resource of each character, so is not unlimited in any sense.

In 3e, a cleric is able to spontaneously burn prepared spells for healing, and has the best selection of healing spells, making him the best healer in the game. But, with the WoCLW cheap and readily available (through commoditized magic, or Crafting), between-combat healing is a non-issue, whether you have a cleric in the party, or it's a Bard or Paladin or UMD Rogue triggering the wand. In-combat there are other classes able to heal well enough to get by, but the cleric is the best. Relieved of the burden of healing between combats, the Cleric can devote all of his spells to other areas, making him a clear 'tier 1' class, superior to all but the strongest of other full-casters. The cleric is one of the superior options in 3e, but not technically a necessity, a Druid (also tier 1, also capable of healing) could take his place, for instance. And, between-combat healing is a non-issue, consuming only a fairly trivial amount of the party's gold (and possibly exp) resources.


The point here isn't which of the two is better, but the way in which both are better than their predecessors: that is in as far as the Cleric is no longer "nothing but a band-aid," a class that had to be played for the party's mere survival, but which offered very little 'reward' for the player of the cleric. In 3e and 4e, the Cleric is a worthy class, on that's engaging and rewarding to play, with contributions to make over and above merely patching up his buddies.

 

[Gorgoroth]

lots of good points Tony

You obviously know your stuff, and I hope in no way to put forth the idea that I bash 4e while putting 3e or even PF as a paragon of perfect game design or combat simulation, far from it.

But what I'm saying is this : Whatever crafting feat should be balanced with the idea that it should be cheaper to have a cleric (much cheaper) in your party than buying CLW wands, and much cheaper than making them yourself. I'd much rather players need to make potions of CLW, than have easy access fo 275 hp batteries. That said in our PF games without a cleric, our wand has come in handy and allowed us to ram through lots of adventures while stuff having tons of danger and chance of death during combat, something I've never, ever experienced or felt in 4e, no matter the DM, module or custom setting. I appreciate DMs that try to keep the story flowing, but not when the story strings are visible. When PCs die once every few sessions, you tend to learn the value of life and avoiding that. 4e death was just way too uncommon, thus the claims that it was too close to the nerf/carebear side of the gritty/gamey spectrum.

I like a good game where my characters are heros and tough, but I don't like feeling invincible. CLW wands never made my PF barbarian feel invincible, it just kept the adventure going. Nobody really had time to use them in the midst of battle. This is the crucial difference.

Why in two+ years of playing 4e every week did we not respec a single player as a cleric? because none of us died and made us think "hey, maybe I should build my new char as a cleric and the party would do better." Not once did that happen. When your lightly armored striker in a party without healers don't die despite acting all reckless and so on, there is a serious balance problem that makes the problem of CLW wand pricing and feat availability pale in comparison. A level 10 fighter can still die in a dragon's single round full attack action, meaning my PF cleric had to spend his standard actions each round he was engaged in melee with it healed up with the best healing I had.

This is quite different than, well, maybe you might be better off with a cleric in your party.

In PF, in my experience, no cleric = dead.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Gorgoroth: Before I reply, when you say 'Cleric' in the context of 4e, do you mean the cleric class, specifically, or the leader role?

 

[Gorgoroth]

probably the leader role

We had an NPC cleric for a couple levels, and never thought he saved the party, so we got rid of him. We had a killswitch in who was played by a former canadian navy paratrooper and it made such an insanely huge difference, and was very much appreciated, but it only further reinforced the idea that the DM was massively outgunned by the PCs in terms of difficulty. Perhaps this was our DMs problem in not making ECL + 5 battles for us to challenge us, but I mean, a few lucky rolls here and there should have at least killed us once or twice. Never did. We didn't once have to bring a character's body back to town to pray or chant his mantra and ask the high level church gods to raise his body in exchange for fulfilling some quest to rid the world of undead or whatever.

This is what D&D has always meant : risk of death, but appreciating great rewards. The only time I saw a PC die was when he was bored with his character in a one-off session in a side-campaign and wanted to re-spec. Sure we had challenges, but the expected outcome shouldn't be success, it should be "whatever the gods/dice decide, given the odds and the resources/vs/challenge of the enemy". A lot of my critiques could be fixed by house rules, but the core ECL ratings of monster encounters was way too easy. I don't really remember any time except once when my paladin was out of surges where I ever worried about dying. I did a kiting/run and hide + marking strategy.

The only thing having a warlord in our party meant that we'd end encounters faster and wasted less resources, not that it meant we were in any less of a threat.

Unfortunately for any new rules in Mordenkainen's emporium relating to healing potions, I never tried anything from there, simply because every single 4e game that has been going on in various circles of gamers I know has died in favor of other game systems. I loved to play 4e as a player for the fun + tactics of it, but it felt like not D&D and I'm not the only one. Even then, PF is riddled with issues too, albeit it still works better overall. Balance be damned, we have two wizards and one alchemist and a bard in our current group, and have a great time doing really fun + creative things, both in and out of combat.

 

[Tony Vargas]

*deleted double post*

 

[Tony Vargas]

OK, so the class, specifically.

If I follow what you're saying, 4e 'killed' the cleric by not delivering enough TPKs in the absence of that specific class?

OK, that's true. 4e's emphasis on roles did eliminate the need for any one specific class. If no one feels like playing a prayer-mumbling servant of a deity, no one has to. Your leader functionality can come from a badass-warrior warlord, or chant-mumbling shaman ally of the spirits, or spell-mumbling tinkerer artificer or spell-singing teen heart-throb bard. One of those has gotta appeal to someone in just about any group.

By the same token, 4e also 'killed' the fighter, magic-user and thief.


It may be that your DM stuck to the standard encounter budget a little too closely, or that your party pushed the envelope on synergy or optimization a bit, or both. But it really sounds like you just have a very particular expectation about the game. I remember playing the game in that mode when I started, and while it was kinda fun in it's way, at the time, I fairly quickly moved on to more story-oriented approaches that tweaked rules, circumstance, and even fudged the occasional roll, to keep character deaths down to dramatically appropriate levels. 4e doesn't require that kind of tweaking, so, yes, it is absolutely less randomly lethal than it's predecessors. It can be rendered quite lethal if the DM so desires, though. It's really nothing more than encounter balance being more consistent.

Oh, and to tie it back, healing surges are part of that more consistent encounter balance.