Are you talking about your own preferences here, or trying to offer a general solution?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.
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IMO there is an easy off-screen solution or two, and is not quite comparable to the issues raised with in-combat healing.
I can tell you that my players have no problem with inspriational healing - PCs who revive when they get their second wind, or are urged on by a comrade - but would laugh at the idea of the healing houses that you mention being ubiquitous and inexpensive.
I must confess that I've mostly lost my grip over where Next is at as far as healing rules are concerned - I've been reading Mearls' L&L columns, but not following all the permutations in the rules documents.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.
But encounter-based healing (inspirational or otherwise) needn't be at odds with attrition, as you note with your reference to healing surges. If Next doesn't have healing surges, there are other ways of imposing a rationing requirement - eg the inspirational healing must happen with N rounds of the hit points being lost (or, to make the bookkeeping easier, you could say that it must happen within the temporal scope of the same encounter).
I don't quite get what "earning" is in this context. Nor do I quite follow your point about "nova-ing". Provided that nova-ing is properly rationed, the choice whether or not to nova is part of the tactical depth, and also part of the emotional experience (eg "That really ticked me off. Now I'm going to go all out!").I also get where pemerton 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 don't understand why Fate Points or Iron Heroes-style token pools are radically different from rationing via encounter or daily limits. Obviously the technical details are different, and hence the play experience, but I'm missing why one involves tactical depth and the other doesn't.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.
AD&D had psionic attacks causing hit point loss. 4e has psychic damage. And AD&D and 3E all had the Phantasmal Killer spell, which causes hit point loss due to terror.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.
This is not true of the rules of Gygax's AD&D, nor of 4e. I don't know later AD&D or 3E well enough to comment.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.
The warlord was contentious exactly because it forces a closer examination and requires the gaming table to get on the same page in a way they were never asked to before.
The problem is not entirely "what do/should hit points represent" but "should any aspect of the game (like a 4e warlord) compel us to examine more closely what hit points represents?" Because once we examine it, we have to decide which is what, and probably splinter D&D into subset playstyles
Bot these posts are written making presuppositions (or series of them) that I (and perhaps other likers of warlords or of 4e more generally) do not share.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.
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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/.
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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.
For instance, I see a purpose for warlords other than to "provide fuel to a fire" or force us to work out what hit points represent- namely, to explain what is occupying a space that the game should always have had, given its definition of hit points, but that it never did.
The suggestion that, until 4e, hit points never caused any issues is simply not correct. I am one of many D&D players who left the game for its late-70s and 80s rivals (in my case Rolemaster, for many others Runequest or HERO or other simulationinst system) precisely because of dissatisfaction with the D&D combat system, and in particular the oddities around hit points - they were at one and the same time physical (because required days of rest, or cure wounds spells, to restore) but not physical (because you could lose nearly all of them yet be not at all physically impaired). 4e brought me back to D&D because it presented a coherent picture of hit points, embracing the implications of them being a metagame device for tracking combat resilience. And the warlord is one element of that. (Another is the recognition in some adventures - eg the Cairn of the Frost King - that Intimidate checks can cause hit point loss.)
I think the Disintegrate spell is a telling example. I mean, if hit points are meat, and a PC loses all but 1 or 2 of them to a Disintegrate spell, then how is that PC healing to full from resting? Is s/he a lizard or salamander that can regrow limbs? Why does the Regeneration spell not have to be used?
Whereas in 4e none of these questions arise. If you take damage from a Disintegrate spell but haven't been reduced to a pile of ash, then we know what happened - you fought off the magic, but got worn down (emotionally, physically) in the process.
I have some views on how this can be handled - whether they are more widely workable solutions I don't know.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.
On "How well is he doing?", I use the 4e bloodied condition as a solution. You can tell when he's bloodied. (And this can be narrated pretty easily for most opponents - for stone golems and the like it gets a bit trickier, but they're not that common as enemies.)
On the description that is then invalidated by later events - the "long middle" - I find that this pushes narration away from "The orc hits you and your guts start spilling out", towards a more comic-book or "PG cinema" style of narration - more emphasis on the action, less on the actual injury. A post upthread mentioned greataxe criticals as an objection to warlords, but in AD&D or 3E if you narrate a greataxe critical against a PC in any graphically vivid way you're then going to have to confront the issue that anyone can stabilise that wound, and that the PC in question will be up and about even without medical attention in a time ranging from a few days (3E) to a few weeks (AD&D).
(Narrating vicious wounds against NPCs is a completely different matter. There is no need to treat their middle in such a long fashion - when they go down, they're DOWN!)
I think that what I described is not just gamist (at least in the sense of "step on up"). Feeling the desparation of your PC via a mechanically mediating device is key to combat in Burning Wheel, for instance, and that is a narrativist system by default (though no doubt hackable to a certain sort of gamism).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
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I think 4e, from that perspective, is very successful at creating the particular proxy experience you write of.
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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
I also don't think that it's not fiction-oriented: part of the point of the mechanical mediation is to bring the fiction to life for the players via the sort of proxy experience I am pointing to. But I don't disagree that it is (or can become) limiting - there are stories and thematic material that 4e will never support, for instance (and likewise Burning Wheel).
I'm not 100% sure I know what you mean by "prioritising story". I think that in a certain sense of that phrase 4e prioritises story (eg by trying to ensure that its mechanical systems engender the relevant experience, so that your paladin plays as a stalwart ally, your fighter as a master of the battlefield, your warlord as an inspirational leader, etc) but I'm assuming that's not the sense that you have in mind. I don't know FATE well enough to just read your intentions off your reference to it, but are you envisaging a wider range of conflict situations than just combat as being viable? And/or a wider range of player narrative/metagame resources than 4e's power system?
Yes, I mentioned this point in that very thread. I think I'm on pretty much the same page as you, [MENTION=11821]Obryn[/MENTION] and [MENTION=79401]Grydan[/MENTION].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.
And at least perhaps in the same book as [MENTION=6688937]Ratskinner[/MENTION], though maybe in a different chapter.