D&D 4E The problem I've having with 4e.

[Toras]

While there are a few fluff changes that do not precisely thrill me. (As a fan of planescape, alignments, and a few other things that have gone the way of the dodo). But I have come to the conclusion that my greatest problem with 4e and one that might indeed be fixed when June comes round and I find myself thumbing through the new book.

It is a problem of How and Why, from an IC perspective. What are Healing Surges and why do only I have them? How do they work?

Why can I only wear 1 ring from 10-20 and 2 from 20-30? What happens when a lower level person attempts to dawn one?

The 6 hour rest, why can I recover all of my wounds once a day by resting for six hours? What is it about Daylies that makes them so? Or encounters? Why?

A justification that doesn't revolve around I'm the PC or the ooc design decisions. It really doesn't have to be much, a token effort would be fine. Just something.

 

[Jack99]

While there are a few fluff changes that do not precisely thrill me. (As a fan of planescape, alignments, and a few other things that have gone the way of the dodo). But I have come to the conclusion that my greatest problem with 4e and one that might indeed be fixed when June comes round and I find myself thumbing through the new book.

It is a problem of How and Why, from an IC perspective. What are Healing Surges and why do only I have them? How do they work?

Why can I only wear 1 ring from 10-20 and 2 from 20-30? What happens when a lower level person attempts to dawn one?

The 6 hour rest, why can I recover all of my wounds once a day by resting for six hours? What is it about Daylies that makes them so? Or encounters? Why?

A justification that doesn't revolve around I'm the PC or the ooc design decisions. It really doesn't have to be much, a token effort would be fine. Just something.

Try doing a search. All your questions have been answered multiple times by other fine posters here at ENworld. Since I don't have an issue with those things, I haven't written them down, and thus can't assist you in your search. Then again, maybe someone will re-post here

Cheers,

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Briefly, and IMHO:

It is a problem of How and Why, from an IC perspective. What are Healing Surges and why do only I have them? How do they work?

Depends on where the healing surge comes from: divine aid, espirit de corps, pure desperation, or heroic grit would fit - Paladin & Cleric powers, Warlord Powers, Second Wind, and between encounter surges respectively. All of them come from the inner fortitude afforded by fate to all sorts of living and unliving creatures.

Why can I only wear 1 ring from 10-20 and 2 from 20-30? What happens when a lower level person attempts to dawn one?

It's not a question of rings it's a question of ring slots. All magic items require some act of will or ego to activate. If you slip a ring on a tree it doesn't go invisible.

A Paragon hero has enough moxy to wear weild a ring in addition to a glove. An epic hero gets two rings in addition to gloves.

The 6 hour rest, why can I recover all of my wounds once a day by resting for six hours? What is it about Daylies that makes them so? Or encounters? Why?

• 6 Hour Rest - Hit Points are mostly a function of stamina and pyschic resilience. You get two REM cycles and most of that supply is replenished. At least enough that you start fresh.
• Dailies - Varies by source. Spells are pretty explicitly tied to memory, and Miracles to Divine favor. Exploits represent things that either require a lot of strain or that require opportunities in combat that just aren't going to come up that often.
• Encounter powers are all actions that require a fair amount of pre-meditation. You have them in mind at the beginning of combat you can set things up to use them, but once you've done it you're then too much in the flow of combat to rethink through pulling them off again.
• Why? Because you have a puny little monkey brain, soul, and body. You may be 'heroic' but seriously do you think Arch-Devils have any of these issues?

 

[FireLance]

Why can I only wear 1 ring from 10-20 and 2 from 20-30? What happens when a lower level person attempts to dawn one?

I would put it as: you can wear a ring at any time, but you can only gain the benefit of one ring you are wearing from level 11-20, and two rings from 21-30. Anyone can put on a ring, but harnessing its power is another matter entirely. Only paragon heroes (11th level and up) have the personal strength necessary to actually use one ring, and only epic heroes (21st level and up) can use two.

 

[Li Shenron]

While there are a few fluff changes that do not precisely thrill me. (As a fan of planescape, alignments, and a few other things that have gone the way of the dodo). But I have come to the conclusion that my greatest problem with 4e and one that might indeed be fixed when June comes round and I find myself thumbing through the new book.

It is a problem of How and Why, from an IC perspective. What are Healing Surges and why do only I have them? How do they work?

Why can I only wear 1 ring from 10-20 and 2 from 20-30? What happens when a lower level person attempts to dawn one?

The 6 hour rest, why can I recover all of my wounds once a day by resting for six hours? What is it about Daylies that makes them so? Or encounters? Why?

A justification that doesn't revolve around I'm the PC or the ooc design decisions. It really doesn't have to be much, a token effort would be fine. Just something.

Same problem here.

And while every edition has these sort of issues, it is quite clear to me that the 4e designers have simply surrendered to the fact and chosen to ignore this problem completely.

So at the end of the day, I will have to see if the amount of stuff I have to close my eyes at, and pretend "it's like that, just because", is too much for me to still enjoy the game experience or is so frequent that makes it frustrating.

[BTW, I have an easy time with magic issues like "how many magic ring will work on you at the same time"; what I cannot swallow is to explain non-magic rules with "in a world full of magic, even how you blow your nose works in mysterious ways". That's just not for me...]

 

[Imp]

Yeah, many of the quote unquote explanations thrown around these parts are either very arbitrary (the benevolent-goddess-of-healing scenario) and thus may or may not work with whatever other atmosphere the campaign has, or just not something I'd (remotely) buy, which raises the spectre of: how do I sell this stuff to the players? Will it be too much of a pain to explain this stuff? That's the problem with "the dice and rules have spoken, now come up with a story, snappy" approach when taken to an ideological extreme.

(Also, the explanations I've seen that have worked for me are so involved it makes me tired to think of making this stuff up on the fly.)

 

[Falling Icicle]

It is a problem of How and Why, from an IC perspective. What are Healing Surges and why do only I have them? How do they work?

The most common way I've seen them described is basically a heroic surge of willpower, shrugging off injury. It's like characters in alot of movies that get shot or badly wounded and all seems lost but then, through great resolve, they get up and fight almost as if they were never injured.

Though it does beg the question, why would anyone seek out the help of a cleric or submit to the will of the gods when they have the innate power to heal themselves?

Why can I only wear 1 ring from 10-20 and 2 from 20-30? What happens when a lower level person attempts to dawn one?

I totally agree with you here. It's ridiculous. I've always hated level requirements to use items because it is such an artificial limitation. That was one respect that D&D was better than of all the video games, IMO. If they didn't want 1st-9th level characters to have the rings they made because they are too powerful, why didn't they make some lower level, weaker rings?

Not only that, it takes alot of power away from the DM. Nobody would ever have expected to get a 200,000 gp ring at 5th level. But if the DM wanted to, he could give one to the players, for whatever reason. If the DM thought an item was too powerful for the players, he could simply not present them with the opportunity to get it. But now, it seems like they're trying to "DM-proof" the game by strictly regulating what gear is appropriate for what levels. I don't like this at all.

The 6 hour rest, why can I recover all of my wounds once a day by resting for six hours? What is it about Daylies that makes them so? Or encounters? Why?

I think this was simply to speed things up, since players would always have the cleric expend every last spell to heal them up 100% before resting anyway. But you're right, it is certainly not believable or dramatic. But I guess being injured for weeks after getting bitten by a kobold isn't fun. With all the magic flying around, healing has always been rather trivial in D&D anyway.

A justification that doesn't revolve around I'm the PC or the ooc design decisions. It really doesn't have to be much, a token effort would be fine. Just something.

I agree, it would be nice. And this is probably why there are so many people complaining about the verisimilitude and such of 4th edition. Really, it isn't as much the fact that the rules bend believability, heck every edition of D&D had rules that did that. But at least in the past, there was at least some effort made to justify the mechanics with explanations that the characters could use in-game to explain them. There wasn't as much of a need for a fundamental disconnect between what the players are doing mechanically and what they would be experiencing in role-playing. If there's one thing that bothers alot of people about 4th edition, it's that this concern was thrown to the wind.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Healing Surges are "catching your breath". There is a limit on how often you can do it before you really have to rest, and that's represented by the Healing Surges per day.

Daily powers for spells don't require any more explaination - it's magic. This might actually be a possible explaination for martial daily powers - it's "sword magic". But if you don't like that, you'll first have to accept an important shift:
Some things a character might like to do require a very unique situation. If a character uses a daily power, the player has decided that this unique situation has occurred just now. This means the player takes a narrative control of the game. (which traditionally is only in the power of the DM, which is why it can be hard to get or accept.)
A similar things can apply to per encounter martial powers. The situation isn't as unique as with daily powers, and you might also use other descriptions:
- For a specific maneuvers, you have to strain your muscles in a specific ways, and if you do so, it takes a little rest to allow your muscles to perform it again with the necessary speed and strength.
- Once your enemies have seen your maneuver, they know how to avoid a situation where it up again.
These latter explainations won't make sense all the time, but to any given instance of an encounter, you can construct one. The difficult thing is to accept that the power itself doesn't tell you the specific movements or situation that has to occur to make it usable or renders it useless. There are a multitude of variables, and you can only determine the "true answer" afterwards, since you don't know the variables beforehand.

 

[ZombieRoboNinja]

I've said this a couple times, but an explanation for healing on a long rest:

There is a strange herb that grows in the verdant liminal spaces between the world and the feywild. It has a different, reverent name in every tongue; in Common, it is Heartbloom. When boiled in water as a tea, its petals grant accelerated healing, such that a good night's rest is enough to bind up most minor wounds.

The stuff is expensive by peasant standards, but a pittance for adventurers - about 2 silver for enough dried herb to make a pot of heartbloom tea. No adventurer or military campaigner would go without it. Occasionally trade in it gets blocked or overrun, as with any other good, but the dried leaves can be stored nearly indefinitely and are stockpiled in most major cities and fortresses (and other Points of Light), so barring a major crisis some can usually be found for reasonable (to an adventurer) prices.

TLDR version: When your party camps they drink some special tea that makes them heal faster as they sleep.

 

[SaffroN]

What are Healing Surges and why do only I have them? How do they work?

Why can I only wear 1 ring from 10-20 and 2 from 20-30? What happens when a lower level person attempts to dawn one?

The 6 hour rest, why can I recover all of my wounds once a day by resting for six hours? What is it about Daylies that makes them so? Or encounters? Why?

The gaps in the description leave room for imagination. I could write a ten page essay describing my bedroom door. I could tell you every facet of every detail. The sound it makes when it opens fast. The sound it makes when it opens slow... Or alternatively i could tell you its white, and leave you to fill in the gaps...

Every person will have their own answers to these questions that you ask. You can see this happening with all the different responses your getting. The gap has been left for a reason. However, you did ask. So this is how i see things in my minds eye.


Healing Surges: They don't even apply. Just because your character has regained HP doesn't mean that the cuts and bruises disappear. Until your character is on the ground, Don't even worry about the ups and the downs. Just keep adding cuts and bruises and don't take em' away. My characters don't even get seriously damaged until they are on the ground, and even then it only was a fatal blow if they don't get up.

resting: Given my explanation above... You can see how a 6 hour rest would put the players back to health. A few bandages, maybe not even that, and your away again. No problems.

Per Encounter Powers:It depends on the power. I dont use one explnation for all powers. I often choose one of these or make one up:
Opportunity: In the case of most powers, i see it as a Opportunity. A opponent fumbles in combat allowing you to whack em' in the face with your warhammer and move on to Thump someone else (passing attack). In general, its a lot like the explanation for a critical hit.
Strenuous Activity: This is for all powers like Force Orb and Witch fire. Powers like this where the attack is generally a spell I see it as a Strenuous Activity that requires luck and hard work to pull off. The Character Requires all is concentration and pushes himself to the limit in order to get this thing off. The power is so difficult in fact that the player was lucky he even managed to get it to work. In the case of the Wizard I don't actually see it as a memory thing, to me thats a lame excuse... They don't just forget that spell after they cast it. In my mind they took a lot of effort to get that spell to work, and to cast another and get it to work... just to difficult, nearing impossible. This also explains Leveling well, as they get better at casting the spell it becomes easier to do so cast again and again without as much drain.
Luck: For things like Second Chance I see it as a luck thing. A fatal swing that could have knocked off the halflings head just misses because the halfling ducked *just* in time.

Per Day Powers: I just see these as an extension of Encounter powers. They are much more difficult and almost experimental and require even more luck. I spent so long explaining the last one. Anyone ask if you want further explanation

As for the rings: i just see it as the character not knowing how to get it to work, as if they don't have the knowledge or the required. "But then why do other items like shoes work?" Well, I see that as an innate thing. All the player needs to know is how to wear shoes, the shoes do the rest. The rings need to be activated and controlled, They require skill.

This is just how i see it. You could see it your own way. Its just fluff.