D&D 5E [Warlords] Should D&D be tied to D&D Worlds?

[urLordy]

The problem with this thesis is that it assumes there's some inherent problem with my style objectively -- that it is an impossible style. That I cannot have meaty HP and simultaneously not care about fast off-screen healing, because I cannot possibly have an enjoyable and internally consistent world where I don't model broken bones precisely but also have them regularly. That if I use meaty HP but don't have some gritty wound-sim or extended "realistic" convalescence, that I'm doing it wrong.

And if anyone at the gaming table thinks you are doing it "wrong", it is so easily mitigated, isn't it? Give it the same treatment as science-fiction: A healing house using herbalism and bone-shaping to quickly mend broken bones. Or a Healing Circle Ritual that the party discovered. It's just so easy to add a fictional element like that to help someone's suspension of disbelief. It does require every player buying into that fictional positioning. Unless you have a Healing House and it's not explained what happens inside the Healing House and everyone imagines what sorts of divine or non-magical things happen there, but I would find it surprising if that would be so contentious and problematic.

Anyway, I don't really understand that particular concern with rest and hp-as-meat, because IMO there is an easy off-screen solution or two, and is not quite comparable to the issues raised with in-combat healing.

 

[Ratskinner]

I regard hp as a classic FitM mechanic, connected to combat resilience. When you are losing them, your ability to hold on is ebbing. When you're gaining them, you're experiencing resurgence. The details are to be narrated accordingly - for instance, a 6 hp blow that drops a 2nd level fighter from 20 hp to 14 hp can sometimes be narrated as a nick or scratch (eg if it delivers a poison rider) but on other occasions can be narrated quite differently (eg as a near miss that wears down the fighter's resilience).

I don't think this is too bad as a mechanic. BW uses a version of it for the Duel of Wits (though interestingly not for its actual combat rules); and HeroWars/Quest used to use a version of it ("action points") for its extended conflict mechanic.

Hit points won't work if you don't treat them as FitM. Gygax worked this out at least by 1979 (and he worked out the same thing about saving throws), which is why he characterises them in his DMG in a fashion that could be lifted straight from some Forge-y explantion of FitM written 25-odd years later.

My problem is not that HP are FitM, its that the "Middle" part of HP stretches out too long. That is the narration of a given HP loss may not be "complete" until well after many other checks and actions have taken place; alternatively, the "post-battle phase" narration often invalidates or ret-cons the narration during the battle. All of which, IME, has the net effect of discouraging actual narration and participation in the fiction during the battle. Which generates the situation where a player asks something like "Can I tell how he's doing?", which is code for something like "Does he have less than <my average damage> HP?" New DMs quickly learn not to put too much detail into combat descriptions because it just causes them trouble later.

In 4e, and in Burning Wheel, and perhaps in other systems too (including maybe other versions of D&D) a lot of the "subtle magic" could be considered to be bonuses to skills (or simlar things like eg abilities to negate failures in a skill challenge). I don't see that it has to be modelled as a spell in the classic D&D sense - and if I've read you right, you agree.

Yup. D&D does a bad job at subtle. I think this is just one of those areas where D&D's heritage as a wargame works against it.

I don't know about pre-4e complaints. For my part I didn't complain: there were things the game couldn't do, and I played a system (namely, Rolemaster) that in my view did a better job at the things the system could do. When 4e came along and it was obvious that it would do most of what I was getting from Rolemaster plus other stuff too, I changed systems.

On the issue of whether these Warlord exemplars function in a 4e-ish way, I'll reiterate something I said upthread.

In D&D, much of the action happens on an in-fiction timescale with which the authors of romantic fantasy don't deal - the moments and minutes of combat. But due to the D&D legacy, of breaking combat down in to short rounds and resolving it in some detail within those rounds, what takes a short time in-fiction often takes a noticeable time in the real world, at the gameing table. And so emotional response that probably wouldn't typically take place in 12 seconds - like being struck by despair, but then roused out of it - can take place, as a player sees his/her PC (or perhaps the whole party) approach the brink of defeat, but then recover.

The warlord, plus other elements of theme in 4e, in my view play upon the implications for pacing, and the experience of play, of this gap between the imagined world of the fiction and the real world of the metagame. Other genres deploy comparable devices - for instance, super hero comics use dialogue in combats that is not easily imaginable from the in-fiction point of view (there would be neither the time nor the breath to speak all those words) but that fits in well from the real world point of view of someone engaging with the medium (the dialogue conveys story, encourages your eyes to linger longer on the panel, etc).

For those for whom imagination of the infiction situation is the pre-eminent aspect of RPGing, I would not expect warlords (or 4e more generally) to be that appealing. But for those whose pleasure comes from engaging the mechanics and therefore (in some curious proxy fashion) experiencing some limited version of the emotions the PCs themselves experience, warlords et al I think can convey the sense of being an inspiring leader. The fiction is not identical to Tolkien, but the theme and emotion are there.

WRT Romantic Fantasy, I agree. Modern fantasy, I think, has increasingly taken a more "D&D" approach and details combat in a moment-to-moment way. However! that moment-to-moment approach isn't where D&D started. Old-school rounds are a minute long! I think D&D felt pressure almost immediately to ditch that. HP, I think, are a relic that didn't make an effective upgrade when the general D&D combat model switched from minutes to seconds. I do feel the game has suffered over time from this disjunction.

TTRPGs are a new medium, and thus require a new understanding or representation of the tropes and trappings of fantasy (perhaps more than one, given GNS). On that, I think, we agree. I think your last two paragraphs there (particularly the last) are a fine portrayal of the joys of Gamism! I don't have objection to that. I will say that I think that those of us who are more fiction-oriented find that that can become limiting.* I intend that as neither demeaning or critical, its just a difference in priorities. I think 4e, from that perspective, is very successful at creating the particular proxy experience you write of. I don't think its any more successful than previous editions at making D&D less tied to D&D worlds (although some may argue that it has a different perspective on precisely what a D&D world is!)

All of which leaves me in a strange place wrt 5e and D&D in general. I feel like a lot of their concerns during development have played around within and between the Gamist and Simulationist end of things and haven't really given me much hope that the new edition will prioritize story more than any previous edition (2e lip-service notwithstanding). On the other hand, I have FATE Core, and kinda feel like I don't need D&D for that at all.

*When rules are added to a system to enhance the play experience, they also define the play experience.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Nah, I just think some of the people who insist on a warlord class or feel that 4e is being disrespected and abandoned are getting hung up on terminology and presentation.

The problem is that every option you offered to put a Warlord into Next involved utterly changing the direction of the bits of D&D Next we have seen so far. And as Pemerton pointed out, the mechanics as they exist are very weak.

The problem with this thesis is that it assumes there's some inherent problem with my style objectively -- that it is an impossible style.

No. It looks at the track record and says that your style is directly against what was stated for both 1e and 4e. And it is incoherent. There is nothing wrong with you playing that way. But if you want to redefine hit points to be meat put that in a module. It should not be the default.

That I cannot have meaty HP and simultaneously not care about fast off-screen healing,

You're confusing two things. You specifically claimed that healing in some editions is slow, and used that for evidence. I demonstrated that healing time in any edition is not even close to slow, and used that to take your points off the table. You can have meaty hit points and fast off-screen healing. But fast off-screen healing is correlated with non-meaty hit points. And healing in every single edition of D&D has been fast.

because I cannot possibly have an enjoyable and internally consistent world where I don't model broken bones precisely but also have them regularly.

You aren't, so far as I can tell, modelling them at all. Or do you have a rules hack?

That if I use meaty HP but don't have some gritty wound-sim or extended "realistic" convalescence, that I'm doing it wrong.

I'm not assuming you're doing it wrong. Whatever works at your table. I'm assuming that you are doing things in a styalised manner that is directly contrary to the assumptions of at least two editions and leads to direct narrative self-contradiction when you examine it. And as such this approach should be in a module and not the default.

You seem to want the warlord to be restricted to a module. Why must your means of handling hit points be the default when it's directly contradicted by two entire editions?

It's possible to use meaty HP and not use rules that account for detailed long-term injury and everybody has a fun time playing their big dang awesome heroes who recover from third-degree burns in a few days.

That's because the big dang awesome heroes are taking cosmetic damage. Which is precisely how non-meat works.

It's less possible to use meaty HP and inspirational spike healing, because while injuries can disappear with some days'/weeks'/months' rest offscreen and no one cares, if those same injuries disappear because someone inspires you on the battlefield, that's not gonna work as well.

Such a pity that they effectively removed healing surges from the game. Because that's the happy medium that means the wounds don't actually disappear, but you overcome them. The wound is only actually healed when you regain the healing surges. The wound takes you down mostly with shock and you force yourself back to your feet. But genuine healing takes either surgeless hit point restoration or recovery of healing surges.

But the mearls's definition of HP work fine with a 5e's day-or-two recovery period, for instance. I don't see any inherent contradiction there (though I personally prefer the recovery period to be significantly longer...yay downtime mechanics!).

The limiting factor on the recovery period (like so much else) is the cleric. Hit point recovery needs to be on approximately the same cycle as cleric healing spells otherwise healing is a game of "Wait for the cleric". Which is why I'm in favour of the 4e Extended Rests with a sidebar discussing what effect setting the rests has on a campaign. (Mine take considerably longer than 8 hours).

 

[Cyberen]

hmmm....kinda depends on the mechanics....

Two big problems usually creep up:

• HP are tied to level advancement - you have to account for that somehow
• consequences - D&D usually has only the one at the end

Personally, I think the easiest way to go is to re-define all positive hp as being non-meat. Meat damage (which could be handled in different ways, modularly) gets triggered by blows at 0 hp. I think I'd call being at 0 HP a condition called vulnerable. That way, you could have spell or attack effects key off of that word, allowing almost all attacks to do HP damage, skipping the SoD issue by putting the "D" part when you would be "D"-ing anyway. So Medusa could have a power:

Petrification Aura: sighted creatures within 20' of Medusa take 1d6 Petrification damage/round. A vulnerable creature who takes Petrification damage is turned to stone.

The 1d6/round simply represents the extra effort required to keep fighting her with your eyes averted. If you don't have anything more effort to give....

The generic/default vulnerable table could produce results like Light, Serious, or Critical wounds (maybe even Dead). Each of those could have different mechanical effects attached modularly as well.

Sample Spell Language:
Protection from Petrification: This spell protects the subject by absorbing the first 50 points of Petrification damage that would affect the subject.

Cure Serious Wounds: The spell removes any Serious and Light wounds from the recipient, as well as any effects thereof.

Cause Fear: This spell does 2d8+10 Fear damage to all creatures within 20' of the caster. Vulnerable creatures who take Fear damage become Shaken. A Wisdom save halves the damage.

Constitution would no longer affect HP, but would likely modify the results from getting hit while vulnerable, as well as many saves.



I think I'd have all your normal HP recharge pretty frequently, possibly limited to some fraction if you are wounded.

This is my own favorite take on HP, nicely put in words and rules. I keep my fingers crossed someone at wotc reads it, but with the level of e-warring and Mearls hate going on, it is a long bet...
I still have some gripes with the 5e Warlord :
* I don't want the Battle Captain archetype been taken over by a 4e flavour (nor the Ranger being exclusively described along 1e terms, etc. It's not about a specific edition). I think most controversial options would be better addressed by (big) feats, or, even better, by specific subclasses.
* it would be nice if the game natively supports many playstyles, including the "time-honoured" battle of attrition. This is not compatible with encounter-based, free healing. Healing should have a cost, a la healing surge. Hit dice ? It would please my sensibilities if in-combat healing was made more expensive than out-of-combat. I get the appeal of a panic button, but I want strings attached to it.
* when I'm in a "combat as sport" mood, I don't really care for balance, but pacing and combat dynamics are important for me. I also get where [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] wants to bring his players, emotionnally speaking. Last minute healing can contribute to these moments, but, divine or mundane, these kind of SFX should be earned, not spammed casually. More generally, the ability to nova kills both the fun of the sport and the tactical depth. I hope we'll get an easy and "balanced" way to regulate them, and the L&L about dragons sparkle some hope for a Fate Points system (fueling dailies ?). Let's remember Mearls wrote Iron Heroes and its pool-building system. This may appear tangential to the Warlord issue, but I think the Warlord would shine with such mechanics, and I would hate wotc to copy/paste the 4e version rather than working hard on the class.

 

[CM]

It is telling how in the "Joke Components" thread, the reasonable answer is "just ignore them if you don't like them" but in this thread, the same answer is not correct when it comes to the warlord as a class (as implemented in 4e) and inspirational healing.

 

[Warbringer]

I'm not about to tell people what they should or shouldn't want, and as I've mentioned upthread, if "THERE MUST BE A WARLORD CLASS" is a line in the sand for enough of WotC's potential market, they should probably just do that, if only to try and appease the unpleasable fanbase. But that's a potential marketing/business reason, not a good design reason.

True, but to be fair, the same logic is easily applied to the Ranger and Paladin classes right out of the gate. Their design space is easily filled with a modular approach as a class approach, but ultimately D&D is a class based game

 

[DMZ2112]

Two editions of D&D might hand wave hit points as being an abstraction, but all seven versions of the game only cause you to lose them when a physical event penetrates or bypasses your physical defenses. By the RAW, you don't lose hit points to blocked blows that were simply exhausting or a strain to defend against, and you don't lose hit points to any kind of miss.

That's a lot of hand waving. Try having that conversation with a player sometime. "You deflect the orc's hammer strike and it rebounds off your armor with a loud 'clang!' You take 14 points of damage." "Uh, what?"

Enjoy the pitchforks and torches.

Personally, I don't actually come down on either side of this issue, because for the reason I've put forward and for the reasons stated earlier in the thread, hit points are and have always been completely ambiguous. And that has never impacted 99% of the community's enjoyment of the game.

We don't have to solve this problem. Hit points should continue to be ambiguous in D&D Next. It's not hurting anyone. It's not even exhausting or causing strain to anyone.

D&D is a system that makes certain assumptions -- one of them is that being a high-level fighter allows you to absorb ludicrous quantities of physical abuse. Another is that magical healing exists and at high levels can completely ameliorate such ludicrous abuse in an instant. Eliminating these things is not as simple as a hand wave. They're intertwined with each other and with dozens of other conceits that make D&D what it is.

The purpose of D&D Next is to bring D&D back to baseline, not to turn the game into a dozen things it was never intended to be. And for what it's worth, for my part, the warlord falls outside of D&D baseline. The warlord is an attempt to hand wave several integral assumptions about the D&D universe, and it falls down on a number of counts.

The warlord is essentially an in-game nod to the out-of-game absolutist opinion that hit points cannot be and are not meat. A warlord character would never describe what he does as healing, but in order for his class to be a viable player choice, it has to be able to provide damage amelioration on a level with the cleric, which means that at high level he has to be able to help allies recover from spell attacks like Disintegrate, which do not fart around about exactly what they are doing to characters. They are causing grievous bodily injury.

Even at low levels, the warlord has to be able to exhort his allies to get up following /greataxe criticals/.

The cleric, in contrast, is not beholden to an absolutist view of the rules. Whether the damage caused is bloody, fatiguing, or even just emotionally draining, the cleric's magic can deal with it.

So the issue here is that the warlord isn't actually a much-needed non-magical healing option. In order to mesh with the rest of the system, his abilities are /equivalent/ to magic, and flavoring them otherwise falls flat at worst, and at best it calls into question what the benefits of divine intervention are, exactly. I mean, why kowtow to a power when you can just learn to shout your allies' wounds away?

As near as I can tell, the only purpose the warlord really serves is to provide fuel to the fire of the argument over the nature of hit points. If you don't want magical healing in your campaign, then you don't want clerics OR warlords -- neither class obeys the laws of physics and nature as we understand them.

 

[Grydan]

Two editions of D&D might hand wave hit points as being an abstraction, but all seven versions of the game only cause you to lose them when a physical event penetrates or bypasses your physical defenses. By the RAW, you don't lose hit points to blocked blows that were simply exhausting or a strain to defend against, and you don't lose hit points to any kind of miss.

Psychic/psionic attacks reduce HP without ever interacting with physical defenses.

4E, at least, includes attacks that deal damage on a miss.

Prior editions include effects that deal half-damage on a successful save.

The purpose of D&D Next is to bring D&D back to baseline, not to turn the game into a dozen things it was never intended to be. And for what it's worth, for my part, the warlord falls outside of D&D baseline. The warlord is an attempt to hand wave several integral assumptions about the D&D universe, and it falls down on a number of counts.

The stated goal of D&D Next is not 'to bring D&D back to baseline', but to provide a D&D that appeals to fans of all editions.

The warlord is essentially an in-game nod to the out-of-game absolutist opinion that hit points cannot be and are not meat. A warlord character would never describe what he does as healing, but in order for his class to be a viable player choice, it has to be able to provide damage amelioration on a level with the cleric, which means that at high level he has to be able to help allies recover from spell attacks like Disintegrate, which do not fart around about exactly what they are doing to characters. They are causing grievous bodily injury.

I am unable to consider any injury grievous when it:
1. Fails to impede me in performing any physical task: the game cares not whether I have 1 HP or 1 billion HP when it comes to running, climbing, swinging a sword, balancing on a tightrope.
2. Fails to impede me in performing any mental task: actual serious injuries are generally painful and distracting. They make it hard to concentrate on simple tasks, never mind complex ones. The game cares not whether I have 1 HP or 1 billion HP when it comes to performing mental tasks such as knowledge checks, answering riddles, or outsmarting a genius-level opponent.
3. Fails to have any impact on social interaction: People respond differently to those who are grievously injured than to people who are hale and hearty. The game rules are silent on this matter, and as covered in the previous two points, given that my character can have this 'grievous injury' and still act as an entirely healthy person, it's easy to see why. A person who's a stubbed toe away from death is apparently just as healthy in outward appearance as someone who can survive being stepped on by Godzilla.
4. Will recover on its own without any medical treatment whatsoever: Even in the slowest 'natural healing' options presented over the years, aside from those variations without ANY natural healing at all, even the most 'grievous' of injuries requires no medical attention whatsoever, as long as the character's HP are in the range of positive numbers. Any loss of HP is eventually erased merely by resting. A truly grievous injury would require immediate medical attention and specialized care, not just bed rest. If someone severs an artery, leaving them untreated and sending them to bed will quickly leave them dead: I guess 'grievous injuries' never include severed arteries.

I mean, why kowtow to a power when you can just learn to shout your allies' wounds away?

Why study arcane magic to learn how to throw fire at range when you can pick up a longbow and a flaming arrow?
Why devote yourself to a code of honour when anyone can smite the forces of evil just as dead without any such commitment?
Why master lock picking when the right spell (or a big enough axe) will open any door or chest?

Well, for one thing, there's more to the cleric than healing (and more to the wizard than range fire, and more to the paladin than killing evil, and more to the rogue than picking locks … ).

For another, even if the cleric and the warlord were exactly identical mechanically (which I've yet to see anyone ever ask for), the difference in flavour alone would lead people to pick one over the other. Some people want to be the holy man, regardless of whether it gets them magical perks or not. Others want nothing to do with following a god, regardless of how many perks it might get them.

As near as I can tell, the only purpose the warlord really serves is to provide fuel to the fire of the argument over the nature of hit points. If you don't want magical healing in your campaign, then you don't want clerics OR warlords -- neither class obeys the laws of physics and nature as we understand them.

HP themselves never have and never will obey 'the laws of physics and nature as we understand them' (as nothing in nature or physics has hitpoints), so expecting things that interact with them to do so seems odd to me.

The purpose the warlord serves is pretty simple: making people who like playing the warlord (or playing alongside one) happy.

Not everyone who wants the warlord (and a warlord that has healing abilities, or even specifically 'spike healing') wants a ban on magical healing in their game. I have seen warlords played (and played them myself) in parties alongside clerics and other magical healers.

 

[CM]

Two editions of D&D might hand wave hit points as being an abstraction, but all seven versions of the game only cause you to lose them when a physical event penetrates or bypasses your physical defenses. By the RAW, you don't lose hit points to blocked blows that were simply exhausting or a strain to defend against, and you don't lose hit points to any kind of miss.

That's a lot of hand waving. Try having that conversation with a player sometime. "You deflect the orc's hammer strike and it rebounds off your armor with a loud 'clang!' You take 14 points of damage." "Uh, what?"

Enjoy the pitchforks and torches.

Over the course of a battle, adventurers and monsters take damage from attacks. Hit points measure the ability of a creature to stand up to punishment, turn deadly strikes into glancing blows, and stay on its feet throughout a battle. Hit points represent more than physical endurance. They also represent skill, luck, and resolve—all the factors that combine to help a creature stay alive in combat.

So, yes, what you describe is exactly RAW, at least in 4th.

Personally, I don't actually come down on either side of this issue...<snip>
And for what it's worth, for my part, the warlord falls outside of D&D baseline.

Warlords are not D&D... Gotcha.

 

[Obryn]

That's a lot of hand waving. Try having that conversation with a player sometime. "You deflect the orc's hammer strike and it rebounds off your armor with a loud 'clang!' You take 14 points of damage." "Uh, what?"

Enjoy the pitchforks and torches.

That's ... how I narrate it sometimes? No pitchforks, no torches.

The warlord is essentially an in-game nod to the out-of-game absolutist opinion that hit points cannot be and are not meat. A warlord character would never describe what he does as healing, but in order for his class to be a viable player choice, it has to be able to provide damage amelioration on a level with the cleric, which means that at high level he has to be able to help allies recover from spell attacks like Disintegrate, which do not fart around about exactly what they are doing to characters. They are causing grievous bodily injury.

No, hit points can be (partly) meat even with inspirational healing. The key is that non-magical healing allows you to fight through the injuries and operate at a higher capacity. Since there's no other way (as has been noted) to model this kind of fight-through-injury mechanic, restoration of hit points is the closest thing possible.

So the issue here is that the warlord isn't actually a much-needed non-magical healing option. In order to mesh with the rest of the system, his abilities are /equivalent/ to magic, and flavoring them otherwise falls flat at worst, and at best it calls into question what the benefits of divine intervention are, exactly. I mean, why kowtow to a power when you can just learn to shout your allies' wounds away?

As near as I can tell, the only purpose the warlord really serves is to provide fuel to the fire of the argument over the nature of hit points. If you don't want magical healing in your campaign, then you don't want clerics OR warlords -- neither class obeys the laws of physics and nature as we understand them.

It's not about physics or nature. It's about cinematic action and enthralling gameplay, and not resorting to "because magic" for everything extraordinary.

-O