D&D 5E 2/18/13 L&L column

[DEFCON 1]

You're assuming that those lost rounds aren't taken into account when getting the right HP to Damage to AC to Attack Bonus ratios. But they are. In a hypothetical world, a class that has 1/2 the HP of a normal character would last half as long, but each round they get would accomplish twice as much.

No, they're not. It is virtually impossible for the designers of this RPG to be able to accurately determine how often PCs will fall unconscious, how many rounds it would take for them to maybe or maybe not be brought back from consciousness by any possible amount of clerics in a party, and how much damage would be lost or not soaked from those man-rounds of unconsciousness because of the variance of which classes are still on their feet and which ones are or are not engaged in melee with the monsters. Because much of that is also based upon how individual tables play the game.

So any attempt at reducing the power of the cleric in direct proportion to the amount of resources they end up saving the party so that you can keep the cleric "balanced" with the other three classes is going to fail. There are TOO MANY VARIABLES.

It is impossible to balance every class against every other class in every possible party configuration and every possible game situation. There will ALWAYS be situations where one class (or having more than one of a class) is the OPTIMAL situation to have for a particular encounter. And thus... resources will not be lost as fast, and thus that particular party will get to push on to another encounter that another party wouldn't.

And there's nothing wrong with that!

So long as 98% of all parties remain comparable to each other and can run between like 3 to 5 encounters, or 4 to 6 encounters... that's good enough.

 

[Balesir]

4e was more Up-And-Down. The number of surges available usually meant that the PCs would enter the next fight at full health, even without a leader.

Surges in 4e are part of hit points, though. They divide hp into encounter resources (your "hit points", plus surge conversion capability) and "adventuring day" resources (your surges). Look at the surges and 4e has a "downward slope" dynamic, just like the previous editions. What is new to 4e is actually the encounter limitations (and that you have many more hit points).

This is my reading as well. He is basically saying they will go back to the pre-4E model of healing and damage. Obviously how one reacts to that will be dependant on one's attitude toward 4E. If you felt it addressed real problems, you are likely to resist what Mearls says. If you are like me and feel 4E was fixing problems most people didnt have, and that the solution mucked with your sense of setting, then you will welcome it. At the end of the day though, because it is going to be a modular system, this is little more than a presentation issue. All three healing options Klaus listed will probably be doable in the system with the right modules.

The problem is, though, how will the encounter and adventure design guidelines work in all this? The different systems may work in a "they are understandable and none of them make the game unplayable (taste considerations excepted)", but they will have very different implications for adventure design and pacing.

 

[Balesir]

It is impossible to balance every class against every other class in every possible party configuration and every possible game situation. There will ALWAYS be situations where one class (or having more than one of a class) is the OPTIMAL situation to have for a particular encounter. And thus... resources will not be lost as fast, and thus that particular party will get to push on to another encounter that another party wouldn't.

And there's nothing wrong with that!

I agree - nothing wrong with that... but if there are "situations where one class (or having more than one of a class) is the OPTIMAL situation to have for every encounter" (or even most encounters), there is a problem.

 

[Klaus]

Surges in 4e are part of hit points, though. They divide hp into encounter resources (your "hit points", plus surge conversion capability) and "adventuring day" resources (your surges). Look at the surges and 4e has a "downward slope" dynamic, just like the previous editions. What is new to 4e is actually the encounter limitations (and that you have many more hit points).

Yes, I know, but for the sake of this exercise, we're looking at the hit points. So, for you, which would be the baseline D&D hp dynamic?

 

[Bedrockgames]

The problem is, though, how will the encounter and adventure design guidelines work in all this? The different systems may work in a "they are understandable and none of them make the game unplayable (taste considerations excepted)", but they will have very different implications for adventure design and pacing.

I think most adventures will be designed with one of the modules in mind (btw module as a term for rules variation book is a bad choice imo because it also indicates an adventure book), and they will include sidebars and shaded text for adjusting. So an adventure designed for basic, with cleric healing only, will have optoinal encounters and modified encounters for the other two options (the way adventures used to include extra foes or altered encounters for higher and lower level parties). The bigger issue i think will be adventure structure and design philosophy.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I agree - nothing wrong with that... but if there are "situations where one class (or having more than one of a class) is the OPTIMAL situation to have for every encounter" (or even most encounters), there is a problem.

well they just help the party stay in the game longer they dont neccesarily do a better job of anyone else at defeating foes. Yes, you will want a cleric in most partties. The assumptoin of D&D up until 4E was a well rounded party should have a cleric, and not having one makes things tougher. I think what people on the other side of the debate here are saying is this worked perfectly fine for us. This was a key part of D&D for us.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I agree - nothing wrong with that... but if there are "situations where one class (or having more than one of a class) is the OPTIMAL situation to have for every encounter" (or even most encounters), there is a problem.

But that depends entirely on what is important and/or optimal to a particular table, not the game on the whole.

I mean, having a cleric that can bring an unconscious character back into a fight (and being the only class that can do that) is certainly the optimal place to be if a table tends to have PCs drop more often. If that table is missing a cleric? They are always fighting an uphill battle.

Having the wizard being the only class that can drop area of effect damage at range? Certainly optimal for a table that faces hordes of smaller creatures more often than not. And if that table doesn't have one, then they face an uphill battle too.

And the same reasoning can be made for what the fighter brings and what the rogue brings to a particular table.

The only thing we have to fear is if somehow, someway, the WotC designers turn into idiots. And they give an 'I Win' button or a 'I Lose' button to a certain class. But really... what are the odds of that happening? EVERYTHING they do is being vetted dozens of times over, and something OPTIMAL or the ONLY CHOICE in EVERY situation in EVERY party configuration at EVERY table in the world is a little... unlikely? Dontchathink?

 

[I'm A Banana]

No, they're not. It is virtually impossible for the designers of this RPG to be able to accurately determine how often PCs will fall unconscious, how many rounds it would take for them to maybe or maybe not be brought back from consciousness by any possible amount of clerics in a party, and how much damage would be lost or not soaked from those man-rounds of unconsciousness because of the variance of which classes are still on their feet and which ones are or are not engaged in melee with the monsters. Because much of that is also based upon how individual tables play the game.

It's not virtually impossible. In fact, a game probably SHOULD do that, because that's how you get a basic estimation of how "challenging" meeting a certain goal is. Action economies play into these calculations.

It's not a matter of table style to peg average HP, damage, AC, and attack bonus numbers for individual party members and analyze how these deplete over time given various rates of how a challenge depletes these resources.

There are TOO MANY VARIABLES.

Four is too many?

It is impossible to balance every class against every other class in every possible party configuration and every possible game situation. There will ALWAYS be situations where one class (or having more than one of a class) is the OPTIMAL situation to have for a particular encounter. And thus... resources will not be lost as fast, and thus that particular party will get to push on to another encounter that another party wouldn't.

It's true that any game with a lot of options is eventually going to have optimal ones. Eventually. With enough options. The Basic version of the game is the version with most of the options reduced down to only the most iconic/essential, so it has fewer options, and those fewer options are better able to be measured against each other.

But that's not really the core of the disagreement, as far as I can tell. The core of it appears to be that some people want play without a cleric to be sub-optimal as a default rule of the game. Which, as I've pointed out, is a potential issue, and certainly seems like a problem to me.

 

[pogre]

I wasn't sure whether to start a new thread or not, but because this is from the same article:

This week, I'm prepping for a huge game involving about ten players, five tables of pre-arranged 3-D terrain, and several hundred orcs, gnolls, and other nasties in an epic, all-day game. My aim is to fit an entire, epic story line into one day. The characters will represent the last hope against an army of evil that seeks to ravage the land. We'll have sieges, battles, daring commando raids, and good old-fashioned dungeon romps.

This sounds outstanding! It takes me back to the intro of the AD&D PHB where kingdom building and massive battles seemed to be part of the expectations for fantasy campaigns. As much as I love massive miniatures battles - I have really only done this with WFRP. I hope the mass combat rules they come up with have options for an abstrast method and a more wargamey method. I'll be in the latter camp of course!

Now, back to your regularly scheduled healing debate and apologies if some view this as threadcrapping...

 

[Garthanos]

I'm genuinely surprised that people actually think that having a cleric in the party that allows a group to go from 4 encounters to 5 encounters in a day must ipso facto mean the cleric is more powerful than the other classes in the party. Because you all seem to be missing the very real issue that it's not that the cleric is more powerful... but that the other classes become less powerful when they fall unconscious.

I said it but that means the healer adds to the party as much as everything those allies that would have been down, plus anything else he can do... he is a form of multiplier on the party itself and that is a measure of his power. His power formula can result in huge numbers... but should be computed so F+F+F+F = CM x (F+F+F) + C.

where CM is the multiplier of those saved allies that would have been down.

Its non trivial but if it doesnt work out about right.. the symptom seems pretty detectable the Clerics presence inducing a longer work day.