OSR OSR Gripes

Sacrosanct

Legend
Using AD&Ds rules for healing in 5e would have a huge impact (eliminating non magical healing almost completely, spells/powers only reset on a daily basis, etc). As well using 5e's rule of healing into an AD&D game (hit dice recovery on short rest, spell/power recovery on short rests) would also have a major impact. So much of an impact it would change how the game is played. Your handwaving away of such obvious and impactful changes as mere "bookkeeping" makes me think you have no idea about the games you're talking about, or being disingenuous intentionally. It also shows you fail at basic math. The amount of HPs that can be healed in one day in 5e compared to AD&D is huge. Not only does 5e have hit dice, and heal to max after a long rest, but a cleric with 9 available spells of various levels can use all of them for cure wounds, while the AD&D cleric cannot. The difference in rate is not "moot" :facepalm

There have been some ridiculous arguments I've seen in the past, but to say the rest/recovery rules in AD&D is comparable and equivalent (what akin is defined as) to 5e ranks up there near the top.
 

log in or register to remove this ad

Tony Vargas

Legend
Using AD&Ds rules for healing in 5e would have a huge impact (eliminating non magical healing almost completely, spells/powers only reset on a daily basis, etc).
Not a lot more than merely setting short & long rests to different durations. You push out the time scale of the adventure.

The bigger difference is table time devoted to bookkeeping, and that's not a /big/ difference, either.

makes me think you have no idea about the games you're talking about
Again, folks played the game very differently from place to place & table to table back in the day.

The amount of HPs that can be healed in one day in 5e compared to AD&D is huge.
5e shifted most scaling to hps, so, yeah, they balloon. PCs have more hps, especially from CON bonus, especially as they level. Monsters have more hps. They all do more damage. They blow through more healing.

The cadence of play can still be kept to the adventuring day, though, as it always has been.


The ‘rest period’ up to 10 minutes was more to maintain time keeping and to maintain the time pressure of a delve. There was also a 1 turn test period required for every 5 turns of activity. But these rest periods did not allow for recovery of resources.
Nod. And, I'll admit the balance of the turn after a combat being spent in rest &c was probably pretty obscure. But, there /were/ rests on a short scale, however little they recovered, so the short rest / long-rest cadence of WotC era D&D (and, yeah, 3.x had it, de-facto, too, when you paused to top everyone up from the WoCLW).
(already mentioned variants that /did/ give you a little hp recovery for 'binding wound.')

Their intention is to keep the clock moving and keep the time pressure moving. Interesting enough, the one turn rest for every 5 actually coincides with torch duration, as well as with wandering encounter checks. They are kind of akin to blinds in poker, they maintain pressure on the game by forcing resource depletion.
That's fine, no disagreement. The point of short rests was different. But, they're not unprecedented, so not automatically antithetical to old-school feel.
 
Last edited:

Nod. And, I'll admit the balance of the turn after a combat being spent in rest &c was probably pretty obscure. But, there /were/ rests on a short scale, however little they recovered, so the short rest / long-rest cadence of WotC era D&D (and, yeah, 3.x had it, de-facto, too, when you paused to top everyone up from the WoCLW).
(already mentioned variants that /did/ give you a little hp recovery for 'binding wound.')
I don't remember using the bind wounds rule back then, I actually first heard of it as a Swords & Wizardry house rule. Makes sense as a way add a little longevity to a group. I think the common rule is that binding only works on damage taken that specific encounter.

Personally, short rests are, to me, one of the least egregious differences. I don't really mind them all tat much... I've run quite a few games where a disastrous encounter shuts down a potentially lucrative delve. The idea of recovering a few hit points after such an encounter such that the party can explore further is not a bad idea to me.

For me, the one hour requirement is a pretty stiff one... as I rule an interruption prevents the rest. The group has to ensure that they will not be interrupted. One hour is 6 turns which is 3 encounter checks. They have a 50/50 chance of having to deal with an encounter while they try to rest.


That's fine, no disagreement. The point of short rests was different. But, they're not unprecedented, so not automatically antithetical to old-school feel.

I think a lot of the feel of old school is in resource recovery. There is a slider between no recovery (you have what you went in with and you must be as efficient as possible with it) to easily obtained recovery (you can refresh your capability frequently enough and maintain your strength from encounter to encounter).

The closer that slider is to lack of recovery, the more old school in feel it is to me. But for me, it doesn't have to be pushed hard to the left.
 

Sacrosanct

Legend
5e shifted most scaling to hps, so, yeah, they balloon. PCs have more hps, especially from CON bonus, especially as they level. Monsters have more hps. They all do more damage. They blow through more healing.

.

When you make comments like this as to why healing is comparable in AD&D to 5e, this is why I think you either don't know anything about the game rules (which I doubt that's true), or that you hope no one else knows the difference, or that you're being intentionally disingenuous. I know you know the rules, so I can't figure out why you're insisting on arguing something that is so clearly not true. Yes, hp increased in 5e, but the ratio increased so much, that they aren't comparable as you claim. I shouldn't even have to show you the math because it's so obvious, but apparently I do:

5th level party, AD&D:
Fighter: 33 hp (+1 bonus from con)
Cleric: 23 hp
Mu: 13 hp
Thief: 18 hp
Healing: no hit dice. 1 hp per party member (total: 4). cleric has 5/5/1 spells (2 bonus 1st level and 2nd level due to WIS score). Available healing spells: cure light wounds 5x (5-40 total points)

Total hit points: 87. Total points able to be healed: 9-44. Average: 27. Ratio: max: 51%. Average: 31%

5th level party, 5e:
Fighter: 52 hp (+2 bonus from Con since the same value in 5e gives a +2 bonus when in AD&D its +1)
Cleric: 28 hp
Wizard: 18 hp
Rogue: 28 hp

Healing: short rests: 5d10+10+10d8+5d6 available (30-170 points, average: 100). Long rest: 126 points. Cleric healing: 4/3/2. Can use cure wounds at every slot, so: 4d8+12 (spell modifier that AD&D don’t get added)+6d8+9+6d8+6 = 43-155 points. Average: 99 hit points.

Total hit points: 126. Total points that can be healed: 451. Average: 325 points. Ratio max: 358% Ratio average: 258%


Summary
Even though hp increased in 5e, the rate of healing is exponentially higher than AD&D over an adventuring day. In 5e, you can recover 3.5 times your party's hit points in a day. In AD&D? 1/2 your total hit points. Not even remotely close, let alone "a moot difference" as you say. You're simply wrong here. By a lot. And that's not even accounting for all of the other things in 5e that recover after a short rest, or comparing a party without a cleric in each edition (which would make the disparity even far greater than it is), or things like healing kits in 5e vs 1e. There are entire classes designed around short rest recovery. AD&D has nothing even remotely close. I have no idea why you continue to argue they are comparable when I know you know they aren't.

*Edit* updated as I used only 1 HD per day, and I should have used 5 HD per day per PC
 
Last edited:

Umbran

Mod Squad
Staff member
Supporter
Summary
Even though hp increased in 5e, the rate of healing is exponentially higher than AD&D over an adventuring day. In 5e, you can recover 3.5 times your party's hit points in a day. In AD&D? 1/2 your total hit points. Not even remotely close, let alone "a moot difference" as you say. You're simply wrong here. By a lot.

With respect, this doesn't tell us anything until you also do a measure of how fast PCs are expected to *lose* hit points. If AD&D monsters generally did less damage, or an AD&D party dealt with far fewer monsters in a day, yes, it could be moot.
 

Lanefan

Victoria Rules
"Something akin to" is, I think, a pretty low bar. Admittedly, the balance of a 10 minute turn is a lot less resting than 5e's one hour. But it's still a rest, and it's still short. Some variant I vaguely recall even let that 'bind wounds' assumption heal d3 hps. Which, at 1st level, in particular, was nothing to sneeze at.
Interesting. I always thought this was an ancient house rule adopted before I started playing - never knew it had an official basis.

Not spells in any standard class, now, but there were the occasional n/turn items or special abilities.
I can think of gobs of per-day things and even a few x-per-hour devices but I can't for the life of me think of anything that recharged after a turn.
 

Tony Vargas

Legend
Interesting. I always thought this was an ancient house rule adopted before I started playing - never knew it had an official basis.
To be clear, the balance of the turn being used in resting was the obscure rule, the d3 for 'binding wounds' during that rest was very much a variant - a Len Lakofka variant, I'd guess, at least, a lot of 'em that got heavily used in my area were his, straight from his Dragon articles.

I can think of gobs of per-day things and even a few x-per-hour devices but I can't for the life of me think of anything that recharged after a turn.
Per-hour doesn't ring a bell as loudly. Per turn, does, but I can't recall a specific example, either (also 'turn' sometimes seemed to be used ambiguously, like it might mean 10-min turn, or might mean round ...hmm... how was "turn" used in 0e?).
Heck, I'm near certain there were per week & month, too, but I can't recall exactly what. ;)


Edit: y'know what some of the more oddball recharge times might've been? artifact powers.



I don't remember using the bind wounds rule back then, I actually first heard of it as a Swords & Wizardry house rule. Makes sense as a way add a little longevity to a group. I think the common rule is that binding only works on damage taken that specific encounter.
That's how the groups who used it ruled IMX, otherwise you could just keep binding 1-3 hps at a time until you were a fully-healed mummy. ;)

Personally, short rests are, to me, one of the least egregious differences. I don't really mind them all tat much... For me, the one hour requirement is a pretty stiff one...
Nod. I don't feel like they deviate the cadence of the game that much from prior editions, and, when they do, it's mostly because they're so /long/ - they feel more like the 4hr-nap (below) than the balance-of-the-10min-turn (above).

I think a lot of the feel of old school is in resource recovery. There is a slider between no recovery (you have what you went in with and you must be as efficient as possible with it) to easily obtained recovery (you can refresh your capability frequently enough and maintain your strength from encounter to encounter). The closer that slider is to lack of recovery, the more old school in feel it is to me. But for me, it doesn't have to be pushed hard to the left.
And, like a lot of old-school feel, it could vary with the place, time, group, and the variants in use and the unspoken expectations in play. Some groups would, by convention, "go back to town" to rest whole days. Others would use the shorter rest times to recover low-level spells and barricade themselves in a dungeon room for 4 hrs to qualify to re-memorize spells.

I mean, if you have a time-pressure scenario, and it's below the threshold of a recovery cycle, you have no recovery, you use things up, they're gone, they don't come back until the next scenario... and you can do that for almost any recovery cycle.*

OTOH, if you're engaged in a long journey, or grinding against a mega-dungeon, or between adventures, even a daily cycle becomes a lot less significant. In sufficiently long/unregulated downtime the line between unlimited and daily could become fairly academic.

Ultimately pacing is up to the DM, he can match it to recharge rates as he sees fit (to the limit of his comfort with screwing around with the feel of his campaign), and 5e's formal 1-hr 'short' rest, and 24-hr hard limit on 'long' rests hardly complicates that compared to the obscure rules & subsystems of AD&D and the many ways it was tweaked & interpreted back in the day.



















* I once ran a convention game in which all the action took place between the drawback and arrival of a tsunami that would destroy the character's home city. No time for even a genuinely-short short rest, even using more than a few charges from a WoCLW would've been pushing it. Heck, no progress in 10-min turns, for that matter.
 
Last edited:

Lanefan

Victoria Rules
With respect, this doesn't tell us anything until you also do a measure of how fast PCs are expected to *lose* hit points. If AD&D monsters generally did less damage, or an AD&D party dealt with far fewer monsters in a day, yes, it could be moot.
If one assumes that the party in each game loses few enough hit points per day on average that the characters all survive until tomorrow, then the comparison is valid...except:

In 5e you can be at 3 h.p. and lose a boatload of 'em, but you'll only go to 0 whereupon you'll fall over and start making death saves and during that time someone can cure you up. What this means is that any attempted comparison of hit point loss ratios between 1e and 5e is liable to fail due to the "missing" lost points in 5e that would otherwise have taken a character below 0. (remember, in 1e death at -10 was a very commonly-used option)

This same thing will also skew the h.p. loss ratio in that the 5e party can in theory lose lots more h.p. than they have and yet still survive provided the healer(s) can keep the whack-a-mole cycle going until the foes are vanquished.

So, as [MENTION=15700]Sacrosanct[/MENTION] does above, all we can truly compare are the recovery rates and ratios - and there's absolutely no denying that 5e is way way faster than 1e here.
 
Last edited:

Lanefan

Victoria Rules
To be clear, the balance of the turn being used in resting was the obscure rule, the d3 for 'binding wounds' during that rest was very much a variant - a Len Lakofka variant, I'd guess, at least, a lot of 'em that got heavily used in my area were his, straight from his Dragon articles.

Per-hour doesn't ring a bell as loudly. Per turn, does, but I can't recall a specific example, either (also 'turn' sometimes seemed to be used ambiguously, like it might mean 10-min turn, or might mean round).
Per round was everywhere, as most things couldn't be used or done more than once per round anyway...and that hasn't really changed.

Heck, I'm near certain there were per week & month, too, but I can't recall exactly what. ;)
We've both house-ruled in that some spells can only be cast once a week and added various magical devices that only do their thing once per week or per month (or in one currently-existing case per year, though the item's owner hasn't figured this out yet). Officially I think there might have been some per-week or per-month things but I can't recall what.

Edit: y'know what some of the more oddball recharge times might've been? artifact powers.
Makes sense for two reasons: one, artifacts don't follow normal rules; and two, over the years I've used very few if any 'standard' artifacts and thus I'm not all that familiar with their as-written versions. (usually if I need something artifact-grade I'll make it up from scratch)

That's how the groups who used it ruled IMX, otherwise you could just keep binding 1-3 hps at a time until you were a fully-healed mummy. ;)
Same here - if you didn't get hurt during the fight just ended then you can't benefit from the d3 this time.

We use a body-fatigue point system, and the d3 also only helps if you're still in fatigues; if you went into bodies that means you took the sort of damage a simple few-round rest and refresh can't help you with.
 

Tony Vargas

Legend
If one assumes that the party in each game loses few enough hit points per day on average that the characters all survive until tomorrow, then the comparison is valid
That's not a bad assumption, though character death is hardly unknown in D&D (to put it mildly), at some point, you reach some sort of, IDK, homeostasis, that results in PCs surviving & leveling rather than dying and being replaced.

In 5e, scaling (and some class differentiation) was shifted from d20 modifiers (or targets in the case of the classic game) to hps & damage. Some of that shift, like ending up with 20HD instead of 8 or 9 or 11 (and I'm discarding hard max level classes, and the 1e Bard as an outlier, here), and getting CON bonuses per die as high as +5 (or more) rather than +2 for most classes, started with 3e, of course. But 5e is all-in on monsters that have huge numbers of hps compared to their classic counterparts, and a lot of damage flying around. So getting through a comparable 'day' requires a lot more hps recovery than back in the day, in proportion and in total.

But that's the size of the numbers. It needn't result in a radically different (I hope I'm not over-using the word) cadence of play, or radically different pacing in the campaign.

And, 5e /does/ offer fairly obvious/simple variants to radically slow pacing across the board, if that's desired.

In 5e you can be at 3 h.p. and lose a boatload of 'em, but you'll only go to 0 whereupon you'll fall over and start making death saves and during that time someone can cure you up.
Yeah, that's a rule I'd agree absolutely has to go to get back to the old-school feel. AD&D, if you even used Death's Door, it came with a 1-week recuperation period. So the impetus was the exact opposite of 5e Whack-a-Mole.
 

Remove ads

AD6_gamerati_skyscraper

Remove ads

Recent & Upcoming Releases

Top