4e Annoyances for those who like 4e

[Dausuul]

With Inspiring Word, as well as most leader healing abilities, the creature who is healed is the one that spends the healing surge.

You're missing my point. Inspiring Word doesn't heal anyone at all. It's not magic, your wounds are not closing. You're just being inspired to get up and keep fighting.

And that's fine, if you accept 4E's premise that hit points are an abstract quantity. But if hit points are an abstract quantity, then regaining hit points should not be called "healing." The terminology undercuts the abstraction.

Previous editions had the same conflict in theory - each edition made vague noises about how hit points were abstractions of a bunch of stuff - but they didn't have mechanics that relied upon that claim. You could ignore the blather in the rulebook and treat hit points as pure physical toughness, and if you were prepared to tolerate high-level PCs being harder than mountain rock and stronger than steel (mythic heroes, in other words), it worked. But that no longer works in 4E.

If you did that, you would completely screw over characters who have Wisdom or Charisma as their primary stat and have any intention of getting in melee, such as Wisdom based clerics or Charisma based paladins.

I'm not proposing that changes like this be made while leaving everything else the same. If the system were built from the start with this rule in mind, such issues would be accounted for. Clerics would probably have to accept a lower AC than everyone else, with some other benefit to make up for it.

For paladins, perhaps a variant of 3E's Divine Grace, such that for each defense they can use either [appropriate stat] or Charisma, whichever is higher.

Oh, one other thing I thought of. I kinda wish that copper and silver pieces weren't largely ignored. I'd like it if the base currency in low Heroic tier was silver, gradually moving up to gold by the end of the tier, then shifting to platinum some time in paragon tier, and then moving to astral diamonds by the end of epic tier. I just miss the good ol' days where a silver piece was the order of the day. (I blame inflation )

I don't recall those good ol' days ever existing... but they should have. I've always thought it silly that D&D had three currencies (five if you counted electrum and platinum), but prices started off so high that you might as well only use gold. The silliness is exacerbated in 4E, where prices inflate so fast that they had to redefine the platinum piece and add the astral diamond just to keep the numbers from overflowing players' character sheets.

IMO, silver should be the main currency of Heroic tier, with small purchases measured in copper; gold should be the main currency of Paragon, with small purchases measured in silver; and Epic characters should be mostly beyond thinking about money.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

3. The PCs' non-AC defenses seem too easy to hit. I think there is scope for another type of item that functions pretty much like heavy armor in 4e: basically adding a flat value instead of an ability score modifier to a non-AC defense.

This is a very good idea actually.

I however would even expand it to an item giving a flat bonus instead of an ability modifier to a complete stat. (Like gauntelts of ogre power Strength modifier +2, +3, +4) Maybe with a daily power to add natural and extra stat as item modifier together. (like agile armor)

With main and secondary attribute usually a lot higher in respective tiers you can use it to increase low stats if you really need it for MBA or multiclassing purposes.

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

You're missing my point. Inspiring Word doesn't heal anyone at all. It's not magic, your wounds are not closing. You're just being inspired to get up and keep fighting.

And that's fine, if you accept 4E's premise that hit points are an abstract quantity. But if hit points are an abstract quantity, then regaining hit points should not be called "healing." The terminology undercuts the abstraction.

Um..... wasn't it this way for a LONG time? I don't have any older books in front of me, but I remember 3e, at least, was pretty explicit that hit points modeled getting the heck out of the way as much as they did taking hits.

If they didn't, combat after about 1st level in any edition of D&D doesn't make a lick of logical sense.

 

[delericho]

Um..... wasn't it this way for a LONG time? I don't have any older books in front of me, but I remember 3e, at least, was pretty explicit that hit points modeled getting the heck out of the way as much as they did taking hits.

Yes - in earlier editions (at least as far back as 2nd), hit points represented a whole bunch of things, including outright toughness, but luck, divine favour, and also the ability to turn a deadly blow into a minor hit.

(One thing that was made clear, though, was that if you took hit point damage, this represented some form of wound, however minor. This was required, so that effects that triggered off a hit, such as contact poison, could trigger in some manner than sorta-kinda made sense. If you squinted a bit.)

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

Right. There was always a fair amount of hand waving. We have to prick you enough to poison you, but not have it affect your capacity to fight in any way beyond the poison itself. i.e. no sucking chest wounds until you actually hit zero hit points (and even then, if you stabilize, that sucking chest wound starts to make less sense).

I'm sympathetic to the difference between "healing" and "regaining some wind", but it's splitting a pretty fine semantic hair in a D&D game, given how incredibly abstract combat has always been. If anything, the "hit with a big ass sword" or "not really hit with a big ass sword" weirdness is far the stranger item, IMO, but you have to suck that up or else run a much more time intensive, laborious game dealing with "what exactly it means that I just took a shoulder wound" and so on.

 

[Dausuul]

Um..... wasn't it this way for a LONG time? I don't have any older books in front of me, but I remember 3e, at least, was pretty explicit that hit points modeled getting the heck out of the way as much as they did taking hits.

If they didn't, combat after about 1st level in any edition of D&D doesn't make a lick of logical sense.

You left out the next paragraph in my post, which addressed exactly this point.

Yes, previous editions had the same thing going on in theory. But the mechanics didn't depend on it. The paragraph in each edition saying "Hit points are abstract, yadda yadda yadda," was completely ignored by the rest of the system, which behaved as if hit points were defined as "your physical condition."

Anything that inflicted physical harm knocked off some hit points, and anything that knocked off hit points was inflicting physical harm*. Anything that healed you restored hit points, and anything that restored hit points was healing you. Previous editions were quite consistent about this, and if you didn't mind high-level characters being made of steel and mountain rock, you could disregard the paragraph extolling the Great Abstraction That Is Your Hit Point Total.

4E is the first edition to take the GATIYHPT to heart and act as if that paragraph was more than a handwave for the benefit of people who didn't like characters made of steel and mountain rock. Which is fine, but I wish they had taken the time to overhaul their terminology to match.

(Although I find 4E works quite well if you define hit points as a spiritual rather than physical attribute - your character's vital spark and will to live. Defining them in that way untangles all kinds of thorny problems, like how you can get them all back after a night's rest, or how the warlord can restore them without benefit of healing magic, or how you can survive a coup de grace, or how you can be mortally wounded and dying and yet bounce back up a minute later and carry on adventuring.)

[SIZE=-2]*Caveat: "Physical harm" could include "sucking out your life-force" or "blasting your brain with psychic energy." But it didn't include "filling you with crushing despair." It always entailed moving your physical body down the scale from Healthy toward Dead; and "healing" always moved your physical body back toward Healthy.
[/SIZE]

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

You left out the next paragraph in my post, which addressed exactly this point.

Semantics again. I didn't think that paragraph really addressed it, and just muddied the waters. You made a semantic decision that the words healing and hit points meant different things pre-4e and post 4e, when the same features were there, consistently. You get "hit" by a Colossal dragon and "take damage" which is "healed." Nevermind that anything a Colossal dragon could "hit" you with would be instant death in a world that is not at least as abstract as your average video game.

In short, I think you're making a distinction between the editions without a difference in this case. Healing surges aren't any different than Cure Light Wounds when we're talking about erasing the effects of something that can't have possibly happened in the way the game rules in a vacuum describe, given a world with Newtonian physics even half operating.

 

[Dausuul]

Semantics again. I didn't think that paragraph really addressed it, and just muddied the waters. You made a semantic decision that the words healing and hit points meant different things pre-4e and post 4e, when the same features were there, consistently. You get "hit" by a Colossal dragon and "take damage" which is "healed." Nevermind that anything a Colossal dragon could "hit" you with would be instant death in a world that is not at least as abstract as your average video game.

Okay, I'll concede this point - I do think there's a distinction, but it's not particularly important. Regardless, I have a problem with using the term "healing" for something that is clearly not healing. The problem existed in previous editions, but that doesn't change the fact that it exists in 4E.

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

I may have been a touch pedantic. I do that. Occupational hazard.

 

[Jeff Wilder]

(Never mind.)