Mearls: The core of D&D

[Doug McCrae]

This is only true if you've accepted the 4e trope that the non-physical part of his hits points than have been whittled down amount to no more than fatigue. If its just that he's getting tired out, then sure, once he gets his wind back he should get back perhaps 80% of his hit points. But until 4e came along it was not accepted that the metaphysical damage taken when hit points were reduced was merely being winded, but a loss of such intangible (but possibly real in a fantasy world) things as luck, divine favor, and so forth. He's bruised yes, but there is assumed to be more to it than that. Read Gygax's full explanation.

This is an interesting concept, one I'd not considered before, that there are greatly different varieties of non-physical hit points. And that some recover quickly and some slowly. 3e is similar to 1e in its interpretation, "For some characters hit points may represent divine favor or inner power", though in 3e they recover at a much faster rate, at level/day as opposed to 1hp/day plus Con bonus per week in 1e.

But does this not make hit points pre-4e less representative, less simulationist? Skill, a "sixth sense", sheer luck, "the fantastic provisions of magical protections and/or divine protection", divine favor, inner power. What are these things? In rules terms it would seem more appropriate to regard them as static bonuses to armour class and all saves. But no, they are sloughed off. They can be lost. How quickly do they recover? It seems to me that they could recover at any rate at all. Immediately after the fight a la 4e, a day, a week, a month, a year. They are not real, so who's to say? At least fatigue is something real, something measurable in our world.

 

[Aberzanzorax]

So, you don't fully get the argument (which is the only reason you would not "get" the example AFAICT), but you disagree with the conclusion?

Okay.

Suffice it to say that, with the hit point system as written, my "full hit points" can be less healthy than the prizefighters' "10 hit points remaining".

No I got the point you were trying to make, but I didn't get the example.

This example makes it MUCH more clear:

My full health (in hit point terms) is not the same as the full health of the prizefighter (in hit point terms).

That example also addresses my concern about sleeping giving back disproportionate amounts to two different level characters.


Immediately after running a marathon, I'd imagine a marathoner could still beat out-of-shape-me in a mile long race. It'd be a lot closer, though, than if they hadn't run the marathon...and the next day (after they rested), it wouldn't be close at all.

 

[Celebrim]

Scaling it to the hit points rather than level of the recipient would seem to make the most sense. Which is what 4e does, as every healing surge or equivalent restores 1/4 of the hit points of the target.

Which is where I begin to have problems even more so than I have problems with the notion of a 'healing surge'. I think its a bit spurious to pretend that the justification for that lay in a desire for greater realism or out of critique of the hit point model.

Healing surges go way way too far the other way, essentially stating that not only is some of the damage of hit points abstract, but that it all is. The Healing surge mechanic gives a character such extraordinary powers of recovery that we must assume that they are never actually injured. But this of course presents us with far greater cognitive problems than the straight hit point system that they replaced.

When I suggested healing scale with the level of the target I was thinking something like the following (in 3e terms):

Cure Light Wounds: The target recovers hit points as if it had had a night's sleep.
Cure Moderate Wounds: The target recovers hit points as if it had two night's sleep.
Cure Serious Wounds: The target recovers hit points as if it had three night's sleep.
....

And, "With 8 hours of sleep, a character can restore hit points equal to 1/2 of its level adjusted HD, rounded up."

A healing surge in such a game system might be, "Once per day, you can gain temporary hit points equal to your base Fortitude save. After 10 rounds, these hit points go away, however, at that time you can make a Will save (DC 15) to heal a like amount of damage. However, this healing can never restore you above 1/2 your maximum hit points. Temporary hit points from multiple healing surges do not stack."

Then you can imagine various class abilities that might interact with that:

"Rally Your Forces": Once per day, make a DC 15 leadership check, to allow all allies within 30' to use a healing surge. This does not count against the target's normal limit of healing surges per day.

Or

Indomitable Will [General]
Prequisite: Base Will save +2
Benefit: Your healing save depends on your base Will save bonus.
Normal: Your healing save depends on your base Fortitude save bonus.

Healing Surges are ridiculous by every standard that Hit Points are ridiculous, multiplied by about 20. I can tolerate a certain amount of gamism and unreality in hit points. Healing Surges as implemented are a mechanic too far.

 

[Bluenose]

So what you are saying is that when you lose hit points, you don't necessarily suffer a penalty to your abilities?

The only penalty you suffer from losing hit points, in D&D, is that you're that little bit closer to being put out of the fight. In many ways that's realistic. The adrenaline that kept you on your feet runs out (medically it is more complex than that, but...), and you collapse after the situation is over. You can see it in all sorts of things, from sporting events to firefighters and the military. Often people keep going till an injury stops them entirely, or the situation is over, and then they realise how hurt/tired they are.

Does anyone else think this hit point tangent really belongs in another thread? Not that they've ever resolved the dispute permanently before.

When I suggested healing scale with the level of the target I was thinking something like the following (in 3e terms):

Cure Light Wounds: The target recovers hit points as if it had had a night's sleep.
Cure Moderate Wounds: The target recovers hit points as if it had two night's sleep.
Cure Serious Wounds: The target recovers hit points as if it had three night's sleep.
....

And, "With 8 hours of sleep, a character can restore hit points equal to 1/2 of its level adjusted HD, rounded up."

That's 1 hit point, for a first level character, for Cure Light Wounds. 5, at 10th level. That seems a little low. Though frankly it's the concept rather than the exact amount that I like the idea of.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Does anyone else think this hit point tangent really belongs in another thread? Not that they've ever resolved the dispute permanently before.

It is a tradition, a sacred cow if you will, of ENWorld that we must never create a thread about hit points, but discuss them in all other threads. Forever!

 

[BlackMoria]

Steering back from a lengthy discussion of 'hit points', I don't believe a 'Unification theory' or 'Theory of Everything' is even possible to apply to D&D.

Ask 10 people what the essentials of D&D are to them and you will get 10 different answers. Until the answers to the question can be distilled to points most can agree on, the search for the 'soul' of what makes D&D 'D&D' is like the quest for the holy grail. Many take up the quest but no one finds it (Indiana Jones not withstanding).

If Mearls is looking for 'common ground' to to unify the editions, he is going to fail. Sure, he could try but the real question is not one of 'Could we?'. The real question is 'Should we?' and therein lies the rub. People have stayed with their favorite edition for a reason and that being principally it 'works for them' and it is how they quantify 'what is D&D' to them.

Regardless how philosphical Mearls gets and how much navel gazing goes on in the hallowed halls of WOTC, most people stay with what they know and like and few bail to embrace the new shiny unless the new shiny provides the tools and means for the user to 'tell their stories' and appeal to their inner muse.

Which means, despite the best efforts, if and when 5E comes, it is going to leave people behind to become the latest generation of 'old D&D grognard'. As it has for every version of the game.

Frankly, I am amused by the ideal that some people in WOTC believe that common ground can be found and it will lead to the Mecca of the best version of D&D ever and that the 'infidels and apostates' for the past versions will set aside their tools of heresy and flock to the promised land offered by 5E or the DDI or whatever form the next version of D&D takes.

What Mearls fails to appreciate is that to many, that ship sailed some time ago and there is no going back - because unless 5E is somewhat like 'their' favorite version of the game they play right now, they are NOT interested, else they would have adopted the current version of the game.

And given the differences between versions, most notably the 3.x and 4, getting to some common ground that both the 3.x fans and 4.x fans can get together and sing kum ba yah about is never likely to happen.

Leave unification theory to the scientists trying to explain the universe because that is more likely to happen that for D&D fans to agree on what D&D is.

 

[Celebrim]

That's 1 hit point, for a first level character, for Cure Light Wounds. 5, at 10th level. That seems a little low.

You mean in gamist terms or simulationist terms?

If you just don't like small numbers, you could go to something like:

Cure Light Wounds: The target recovers hit points as if it had two night's sleep.
Cure Moderate Wounds: The target recovers hit points as if it had three night's sleep.
Cure Serious Wounds: The target recovers hit points as if it had four night's sleep.
...

Prior to starting my current campaign (now ongoing more than a year) I experimented with adjusting my house rules on 'cure' spells to almost exactly the above. I didn't like the way it played. The biggest problem I foresaw with the system was that the game purpose of 'cure light wounds' is to ensure that the whole party is not experiencing down time just because one character got a bad break. The revised 'cure light', while it matched the intuitive description of 'cure light wounds' better than the cannonical mechanics did, simply couldn't do its in game job at the time it needed to do it.

So if the real problem is that the flavor of 'cure light wounds' doesn't suggest the mechanics you see, replace the name with something like 'Ordinary Blessing of Healing' that doesn't imply something as concrete to you.

Though frankly it's the concept rather than the exact amount that I like the idea of.

Lots of people like the concept of replacing hit points with something else. It's not the concept that is the problem. It's the implementation. All things involve tradeoffs. It's easy to be critical of something in a vacuum, but when you actually experience the alternatives you tend to see more clearly the pros and the cons. If you have this great abstract concept, chances are its not actually an improvement over the flawed concrete thing.

 

[Windjammer]

Reading this thread reminds me why I don't like the "Legend & Lore" articles from Mearls that much.

On the one hand, I'm really glad that WotC has initiated a column which at least somewhat gives off the vibe that they care about customer input.

On the other, I get no real sense that the input is worked with, at all. Whether that's Mearls & Co. browsing forums like these, or them consulting the poll results at the end of each column - either way, I'd be more happy if they chose to have more direct interactions in forums, like Paizo designers do.

The other thing I'm missing from Mearls' columns is that, once some feedback is taken in, that we see him do something more concrete than handle vague concepts (or sometimes, even just questions) at a significant level of abstraction.

I'm aware though that he's in a 'damned if you, damned if you don't' position. When Heinsoo & Co. went off the wall in late 2007/early 2008 telling everyone else how to think about D&D, I felt talked down to. Now that Mearls is (appears) utterly open about everything, it still feels not right.

Hope the column finds a better way going forward. And I say that with half an eye on Mearls' old blog entries on skill resolution and monster/dungeon design. I liked his contributions way more when they were of the 'here's something I cooked up for my home campaign - what do you think?' variety. I think he might even get as much (if not more) mileage out of reactions to such posts than to these super broad and vague articles.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Mike Mearls' work in the Legends & Lairs series for Fantasy Flight Games is high up on my "recommended" list for those interested in 3.x/d20 System gaming. I would be quite interested in his work, divorced from WotC's current philosophy of what D&D should be.

IOW, if he wrote a fantasy heartbreaker on his own, I would pay attention.


RC

 

[Ainamacar]

This is not quite as timely a response as it could have been. Real life and all.

I agree with down to that point, but disagree about the likely consequences from mechanics or settings. I think D&D players might identify strongly with the emergent mix of mechanics and settings as it happen to emerge at those early tables.

That doesn't mean that we can't talk about the mechanics and settings separately, or tease them out, or even that said players can't separate those impressions from later ones. It just means it is complicated.

I think your second paragraph is exactly what I was trying to do, namely tease out some of the underlying processes in a complicated system. I'm not quite sure why my example gave you a different impression. (OK, that's not true. Among other possibilities, I may simply have written incredibly poorly. ) In analyzing interacting systems one of the most basic tools is to consider how all the parts work independently, and then slowly add in the most important details of the interaction until there is a description that works well enough for many cases of interest. In physics (e.g. various correlated electron systems) the first step is often to replace interactions with fluctuations about their collective mean. Here I'm trying to do it in a loose, qualitative fashion.

Thus, the example of a person's first campaign setting was specifically to point out one possible mode of interaction and its possible result, not to suggest it was immune to further feedback in the general case or that it had ever occurred in such stark terms, much less typically. I thought writing "but when one of these mechanisms is much stronger than the other" was indicative of just that restricted case, where other effects could be temporarily ignored in order to identify this one. The only thing I expressed as "likely" was that a person most strongly associates the essence of D&D with their first campaign. Given the other restrictions, this was so the example wouldn't be too obscure if the interaction exists, since everyone who plays D&D necessarily has a first campaign or equivalent.

Thanks for the cordial remark.