Flavour First vs Game First - a comparison

[Spatula]

WHile you have a good point about healing surges, they are still difficult to map to in-world events. If you dont spend a healing surge then the damage is real, if you do not spend a surge, it is not, is the type of issue that people like RC are having issues with.

The damage is always real. Some effects allow characters to ignore that damage and fight on despite it. They still have physical wounds on their body, those wounds just have no further game effect (aside from the fact that they cost the character healing surges).

 

[Raven Crowking]

No one thinks (I hope) that all your injuries close and heal fully after 5 minuetes as though every character is Wolverines natural son. Instead the idea that I take away from these rules is that after 5 minutes of rest and bandaging and field stitches the PCs are able to soldier on at full capacity. This is certainly heroic and I like it. Unfortunately carried to it's logical conclusion at the end of a long multi-encounter day the PC should be looking like a horror movie mummy but are still bouncing around like acrobats and taking swords to the spleen with barely a flinch.

Imagine, then, what they must look like at the end of a week......

 

[Raven Crowking]

The damage is always real. Some effects allow characters to ignore that damage and fight on despite it. They still have physical wounds on their body, those wounds just have no further game effect (aside from the fact that they cost the character healing surges).

It is amusing to read folks claiming that the game damage maps to "in world" story damage, and yet make claims like the above. You can have hit point loss but no wounds, and wounds but no hit point loss, but the two map.

Riggghhhhtttttt......

 

[El Mahdi]

No one thinks (I hope) that all your injuries close and heal fully after 5 minuetes as though every character is Wolverines natural son. Instead the idea that I take away from these rules is that after 5 minutes of rest and bandaging and field stitches the PCs are able to soldier on at full capacity. This is certainly heroic and I like it. Unfortunately carried to it's logical conclusion at the end of a long multi-encounter day the PC should be looking like a horror movie mummy but are still bouncing around like acrobats and taking swords to the spleen with barely a flinch.

Or looking like John McClaine ala Die Hard, and sighing that he's too old for this *, yet still kicking the BBEG's ass in the final fight. This visualization works for me.

(*I know, that was Danny Glovers line in Lethal Weapon, but the point is the same.)

 

[apoptosis]

The damage is always real. Some effects allow characters to ignore that damage and fight on despite it. They still have physical wounds on their body, those wounds just have no further game effect (aside from the fact that they cost the character healing surges).

The fact that it heals overnight makes me feel the damage is not real. Real damage does not heal overnight.

If the second wind allowed you to temporarily negate damage and fight on, I would agree with you about how second wind works, but that is not what happens. It is a permanent curing of 'damage'. Which means the damage is not 'real' physical damage or that second wind is a magical effect.

We can make up all sorts of reason why this can happen in the narrative but it really further divorces hp from 'physical damage'.

This doesnt make the earlier characterizations of HP a panacea, but i without a doubt feel that they map much closer to a character's physical damage.

 

[GlaziusF]

And from your post just previous to this one, it is equally clear that you don't understand what I am talking about in terms of logic.

I'm wondering if you understand what you're talking about, in terms of logic.

Go back to wherever you learned about ad ignorantiam and reread it carefully. It's a double-edged sword. You can't call something true because it hasn't been proven false, but you also can't call something false because it hasn't been proven true.

To get all AEIO about it, Sometimes True does not imply Never False, and likewise Sometimes False does not imply Never True.

For example:

4e: Fighter with 10 hp takes 8 hp damage. This might be a wound, or it might not be. Neither the player nor the DM knows if it is a wound at the time it is taken because, within context of the in-world story, if the fighter recieves magical healing later it was a wound, but a second wind means that it was not.

In the 4e paradigm, the "past" of the in-world story is frequently required to change based upon "present" PC or NPC actions. Or, as in quantum mechanics, the story stays in a curious state of indeterminancy until after all wounds are healed, magically or otherwise. Only then do we know whether they are "real" wounds or not. The in-world story only unfolds retroactively, after all events at the game table are known.

This is an example of a Sometimes False that you are trying to get a Never True from. You can't see how to build a model that works with the mechanics, so you take that as proof that no one ever can.

When your story is divorced from the mechanics, and those mechanics have no objective meaning in the game world, no matter how much in-world logic your story may have that meaning is not derived from the mechanics. The mechanics simulate nothing outside of the game itself. You just choose to pretend that they do.

...you mean that the game mechanics work just like actual real-world mechanics? Like the ideal gas law or conservation of momentum or the law of gravity? They're just equations. They don't actually simulate anything, aside from the abstract relationships of mathematics. But when we plug enough values in them to activate The Power Of Tautology, then they do. And "plugging in" is just pretending with numbers.

18 seconds from death having been whaled upon by "damaging" blows. Now this guy is not some novice shop keeper who can't stand the sight of blood, he is a professional, veteran hero. He is a hero possibly 18 seconds from death, and possibly a short rest away from full health. I'm struggling to think of a physical condition for my hero that can be reconciled with this.

I know this is going to sound stupid, but "death" doesn't mean exactly what you think it means either. The effects of death, under the rules, are pretty much unconsciousness plus: you can't spend your own healing surges, and nobody else can let you spend them as a free action either. There's still one round left where a high-test healing utility might be able to get you up and moving, but after that, no. You need to have a ritual performed on you before you can stand up again, and you'll have to deal with some lingering weakness until you shake all the cobwebs out.

"Comatose" is also consistent with this. Or heck, if you get rocked into it by a psychic assault, you're a prisoner in your own mind. Cold damage? Hypothermia.

Your soul may not have gone off to Asgard for parties with elf chicks in hot tubs warmed by the burning of unjust laws, but you're unreachable by anything short of ritual healing since your brain has jumped its tracks and can't get back on its own.

I said you only need to suffer one obvious wound, and that's when you're bloodied, but that's not entirely true - if you get down to -bloodied at some point there you have taken an apparently lethal wound, so that you haven't even got a chance to get up on your own. At least not usually.

If you wanted to pour in an extra mechanic you could probably say that if you get down to -bloodied, beyond the "death penalty" in the ritual you hop on a "disease track" type structure with a penalty to hit points or healing surges or something and need to make an Endurance check during an extended rest to shake that off.

If we want to be all Princess Bride about it, you're only ever "mostly dead". And Inigo popped either an alternate level 22 or his destiny utility, from a destiny we haven't seen yet, to return to maximum hit points the turn after he was skewered by the six-fingered man, who was obviously some kind of rogue. But the utility lasted only until the end of the encounter, after which point he was either dying or dead.

Imagine though D&D 5E where the game mechanics are so elegant, that they perfectly mimic the flavour they are trying to represent. Gaming nirvana that will have the entire D&D community on board without having tonnes of people feeling like they need to defend one edition or the other of the game. It ain't gonna happen is it?

Eh, probably not. The problem with mechanics is that you can pretty easily imagine counterexamples. I mean, consider an ice sculpture shaped like a plus sign, standing on end on a marble slab. Now imagine it slowly melting into a puddle of water on the slab. Now imagine that water rising up and refreezing into a five-pointed star.

Congratulations, you just violated the second law of thermodynamics with your brain.

Any mechanic is going to limit the range of imagination consistent with that mechanic to some degree. That's just the way it goes. I'd rather have less limited imagination.

I mean, I can use the exact 4E mechanics to run a campaign based on the surface of a space tree. In space. Where metals are as rare and precious as gems, and everything is organic. Just change the names of money and gear, and give the powers with metal-based names different ones, and really I think that'd about do it.

 

[LostSoul]

And, therein lies the flaw in your argument. When your story is divorced from the mechanics, and those mechanics have no objective meaning in the game world, no matter how much in-world logic your story may have that meaning is not derived from the mechanics. The mechanics simulate nothing outside of the game itself. You just choose to pretend that they do.

The story is not divorced from the mechanics: the hp mechanism helps resolve conflicts. It tells us when one party can no longer carry on the fight.

The in-game meaning is objective and it is derived from the mechanics. We know that the characters involved lose more and more ability to fight as their hp are depleted. How that depletion occurs is subjective and I have to decide how to describe it in a way that works for me.

 

[Herremann the Wise]

I know this is going to sound stupid, but...[some admitedly stupid sounding stuff]...

Yeah you might be able to convince your players of that, but I don't think I could get mine to go along with it. I prefer to use my imagination on the campaign at hand rather that trying to explain why death is only a simple ritual away. And in any case, my dead character's soul would be pissed at being taken away from that elven chick hot-tub thing.

Imagine though D&D 5E where the game mechanics are so elegant, that they perfectly mimic the flavour they are trying to represent. Gaming nirvana that will have the entire D&D community on board without having tonnes of people feeling like they need to defend one edition or the other of the game. It ain't gonna happen is it?

Eh, probably not. The problem with mechanics is that you can pretty easily imagine counterexamples. I mean, consider an ice sculpture shaped like a plus sign, standing on end on a marble slab. Now imagine it slowly melting into a puddle of water on the slab. Now imagine that water rising up and refreezing into a five-pointed star.

Congratulations, you just violated the second law of thermodynamics with your brain.

Yeah... congratulations to me I think your pushing a little too hard on this one. My point in regards to this thread has been that
a solid mechanic that has a good symbiosis with the flavour it is trying to represent won't have hugely distracting counter-examples. It blends in with the fantasy trope well enough that it won't distract the players from what's going on around them, taking them out of the game world.

Any mechanic is going to limit the range of imagination consistent with that mechanic to some degree. That's just the way it goes. I'd rather have less limited imagination.

As I said previously, I prefer to pour my imaginative effort into DMing the campaign at hand rather than trying to find a "credible story" to explain a weird mechanic.

I mean, I can use the exact 4E mechanics to run a campaign based on the surface of a space tree. In space. Where metals are as rare and precious as gems, and everything is organic. Just change the names of money and gear, and give the powers with metal-based names different ones, and really I think that'd about do it.

Right. I suppose you could. I prefer Dungeons and Dragons myself.

Best Regards
Herremann the Wise

 

[Herremann the Wise]

He is a hero possibly 18 seconds from death, and possibly a short rest away from full health.

Full health implies you have all your healing surges.

A character with 30 hp and 10 healing surges in D&D 4e has effectively 330 hp. However, in the space of an encounter, you can wear them down enough so that they are exhausted and make a fatal mistake.

I think there are a lot of people who don't appreciate that Healing Surges need to be taken into account when you're discussing the health of a character. What does 1 hp and 0 healing surges mean?

It means that your character is in a little bit of trouble. However, while I understand that you could interpret healing surges as you have, and that they are an important component of a character's health, it does not affect the point I was making in regards to a situation where a veteran heroic character could be 18 seconds from death, or a handful of surges away from being back to his best performance (just down a couple of healing surges meaning that he could most probably do the same thing again but he'd need an extended rest if he wanted to do it again after that). It is just a weird situation to be in and to try to explain to one's players. I just wish the mechanic was more intuitive and in tune with the flavour it was representing.

The one utterly gamist part of 4e where it departs simulation entirely is in regaining all your health overnight. For those who want a more realistic view of healing, allow only one healing surge to be regained per night of rest (and curative rituals or total rest/tending to return more).

Cheers!

That's a fair house rule. Our group's playing by the standard rules at the moment while we get a good grasp of everything that's going on. I dare say that a new campaign for our group will be house-ruled and your suggestion might go to the top of the class.

Best Regards
Herremann the Wise

 

[MerricB]

WHile you have a good point about healing surges, they are still difficult to map to in-world events. If you dont spend a healing surge then the damage is real, if you do not spend a surge, it is not, is the type of issue that people like RC are having issues with.

But, and this is a big point, in 1e-3e, any "damage" a fighter took was also "not real" until they were actually rendered unconscious... a loss of hit points had no effect on how they fought, which one must admit is a very gamist construction.

Narratively, the actual definition of hit points in all editions has mostly been up to the individual DM. We assume most of them are fake damage: divine grace used up, minor scratches and bruising and the like. This hasn't changed in 4e.

I do agree with anyone who thinks all healing overnight completely ignores simulation in favour of gamist expedience - I'm not quite in favour of it myself, although I appreciate how it makes certain games (quest ones where a time factor is an issue) run smoother, especially when a cleric isn't available. I've been playing Star Wars Saga Edition recently, and the inability for non-Jedi characters to heal is a major problem in the game. If you get unlucky and get shot... well, it stops the ongoing game in its tracks.

Cheers!