Schroedinger's Wounding (Forked Thread: Disappointed in 4e)

[FireLance]

When a character takes hit point damage, you have a quantum superposition in which Schrodinger's Wounding simultaneously exists and does not exist. The existence of Schrodinger's Wounding stops being a superposition of states and becomes either one or the other when narration takes place and the wave function collapses into one of the two states. The key to avoiding Schrodinger's Wounding is to game with players who are probabilistically inclined not to use narration that would result in Schrodinger's Wounding.

 

[Agamon]

When a character takes hit point damage, you have a quantum superposition in which Schrodinger's Wounding simultaneously exists and does not exist. The existence of Schrodinger's Wounding stops being a superposition of states and becomes either one or the other when narration takes place and the wave function collapses into one of the two states. The key to avoiding Schrodinger's Wounding is to game with players who are probabilistically inclined not to use narration that would result in Schrodinger's Wounding.

Heheh, awesome.

 

[Hypersmurf]

I think that "we don't know anymore, you tell us" attitude was a failure for 2E magic items, and was reverted back in 3E with specific prices and manufacturing techniques.

Was that before or after the caster level errata?

-Hyp.

 

[Solodan]

Does it matter? The system is elegant and it works. I'd much rather be able to make stuff up on the fly, and have more leeway in even wounding rules, than have rulesy players say "No, according to splatbook X, wounds are exactly in this order and modifier x y and z apply"

I'm happy that rules that get in the way of the story are getting out of the way in 4E.

 

[Delta]

Was that before or after the caster level errata?

I'm still waiting for you to address the issue I asked of you here:

http://www.enworld.org/forum/genera...ayers-not-characters-stats-5.html#post4501236

As you know, until that time, I don't play 20 questions with you anymore.

 

[Ycore Rixle]

Forked from: Disappointed in 4e

So, "Schroedinger's Wounding" is a problem, but not an insoluble problem. In much the same way, scurvy is a disease, but not an incurable or inevitable disease.

Certainly scurvy exists, but it is rather silly to tell people not to take long journeys because of the risk of scurvy. Similarly, it's disingenuous (at best) of you to present Schroedinger's Wounding as a necessary drawback to 4E since it's so easy to solve it.

Nice analogy. It's a solvable problem for most groups.

I suppose one question is, do the benefits gained make it worth the trouble of solving or avoiding the problem?

Another question is, could the system have been designed to give the benefits without creating a possible problem?

 

[pemerton]

I don't quite agree with the analogy, because it's not a problem to be solved so we can get on with the game - rather, narrating events in the gameworld that fit with what the mechanics tell us is part of the point of playing the game, part of what counts as getting on with the game.

 

[Charwoman Gene]

Your post advocates a

( ) gamist ( ) simulationist ( ) cinematic (*) narrativist

approach to understanding hit points. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which may to vary from campaign to campaign and edition to edition.)

( ) It adds a significant amount of bookkeeping to combat.
( ) It means that most successful hits in combat must be described as misses.
(*) No one will be able to agree on how wounded someone appears to be
( ) It will stop debate for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Players will not put up with it
( ) DM's will not put up with it
(*) WotC will not put up with it
(*) Requires too much imagination from players
( ) Requires too much math from players
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many GMs cannot afford to lose players or alienate potential new players
(*) Casual gamers don't care about crap like this
( ) Character deaths become too random or frequent
( ) Characters are nigh unkillable.

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Poison damage on a successful hit.
( ) Lava
( ) People being stabbed through the eye and killing their enemy before dying
( ) Falling several miles can kill you.
( ) You can survive falling several miles.
( ) Suspension of disbelief issues due to game rule / world action discrepancies
( ) Suspension of disbelief issues due to excessive simulation
( ) Scaling damage at higher levels
( ) Housecats killing low-level mages
( ) Mowing down armies of weak enemies
( ) Heros having a chance to actually kill a dragon with a sword
( ) Specific injuries
( ) Mathematically deficient gamers


and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(*) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on computers is unacceptable
( ) This is too Anime
( ) 4E sucks
( ) OD&D sucks
( ) BXCMID&D sucks
( ) AD&D sucks
( ) AD&D2E sucks
( ) 3.X D&D sucks
( ) Pathfinder sucks
( ) OD&D sucks
( ) We should be able to talk about Edition differences without being censored
( ) Tracking damage should be simple
( ) Death spirals are not fun
(*) Your style of play is badwrongfun.
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(*) Sorry dude, but I don't think it will satisfy everyone
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

 

[howandwhy99]

So, "Schroedinger's Wounding" is a problem, but not an insoluble problem. In much the same way, scurvy is a disease, but not an incurable or inevitable disease.

Certainly scurvy exists, but it is rather silly to tell people not to take long journeys because of the risk of scurvy. Similarly, it's disingenuous (at best) of you to present Schroedinger's Wounding as a necessary drawback to 4E since it's so easy to solve it.

It's a problem because it requires the players to define game mechanics instead of playing the definition and being blind to those same game mechanics. Game model operation and real world operation equivalency is the ideal for a role-playing game. Operational equivalency / simulation is the definition of quality for role-playing. Computer RPGs are doing this nicely, but are limited in numerous other ways.

Defining a game mechanic during play is not role-playing and consistently requiring a player to define those elements just says the game cannot mimic reality without constant redefinition into something other than what it is. Lack of operational symmetry is a fault for any kind of role-play. Requiring constant redefinition of such makes the game a "playing of the system" instead of a playing of the role. It removes the exploration / education a player has within that role and leaves absent that portion of the system the game element was designed to simulate in the first place.

In other words, the role becomes something other than it is in actuality. Like defining every hit in a Chess game as a hit in a boxing match player definition of mechanics during play can be a part of any game system, but that ability doesn't make every game system a role-playing game because such is possible. I think what is confusing some may be that requiring storytelling when playing a role-playing game does not make it an RPG (telling a story is not == to role-playing). It is the operational similarity to the sociologically-defined role. For a role-playing game specifically, it is the confinement of the player to actions real people are capable of when actually in the roles. If a particular operation in a game isn't mimicking the actual role's operation, whether the role is real or unreal (i.e. spellcasting), than it's a bad rule for a role-playing game.

I think many will agree 4E has rules that make it a more enjoyable game than 3E from a competitive balance point of view, but also has rules that make it less of a role-playing game under the strict definition of role-playing as it was originally defined some 60 years ago. As these are two competing desires, it is a rational point of disagreement for those who prefer not to play an unrelated game, but rather prefer to play the role. ...or at least more of it as 4E does include plenty of other aspects that make it an RPG in my opinion.

 

[Cadfan]

I think 4e is less about Schroedinger's Wounding than it is about Schroedinger's Healing.

Healing during combat has specific rules. Healing between combats, and at night, follows only one rule- hand wave it. Assume that you're sleeping off your fatigue, recovering your morale, bandaging your wounds, shaking off the bludgeoning you took, and generally being good to go by morning.

This bothers some people, because they might have a party where the only explicit hit point healing effects are Second Wind and a warlord yelling at them to get their sorry &*%es back on the front line and die like a man. So they wonder how a person who's at zero could possibly end up at full, just from someone yelling at them and taking a breather. Because presumably they were stabbed somewhere between full hit points and zero, and in order to get back to full, someone needed to fix that stab wound.

And the answer is that someone did. Someone bandaged it, or stitched it, or whatever, and now they're ok to fight again. But it happened off camera, and the game assumes you don't need to know exactly who did what. Its Schroedinger's Healing- you don't have to know exactly how you heal off camera unless it matters, and it generally doesn't.