D&D 5E Should the Fighter's "Second Wind" ability grant temporary HP instead of regular HP?

[GX.Sigma]

Was chaining short rests not a thing the devs thought the players would do? Was it intentional to create no real incentive to take an 8 hour rest vs. 4 one-hour rests at low levels? What goal does THAT serve, then?

What? Of course there's an incentive.

4-hour rest: The fighter gets all hp back, and still has no HD (i.e., if he takes more damage, he has to rest another 4 hours to heal). The rest of the party is still out of hp, HD, and spells.
8-hour rest: Everyone gets everything back.

There's really no incentive to take multiple short rests--if you have that much time to spare, why not just take a full rest and make everyone happy?

Can anyone give an actual example of a situation where this could be abused?

 

[DDNFan]

Bit of a stretch, isn't it? Hit points do not, and have never represented straight up wounds.

As for not having time to bleed....Jesse Ventura in the movie Predator even says he doesn't have time to bleed (while he's bleeding), so maybe there is something to it.

If you think it's heroic to imagine fighting dragons and giants and beholders and none the damage your character takes over the campaign is a wound, then go ahead.

That's not the way people play the game or how the game is narrated, and it's not actually what the rules say are happening as your HP goes closer and closer to zero.

When you go below half HP you have injuries and are bleeding. Read the rules, it's right there in black and white. Hit points have always represented, in some fashion, and at some levels, actual wounds. Otherwise the action doesn't mean anything. And Cure Wounds doesn't cure wounds. And dying of a lethal, fatal injury is only a result of one hit instead of possibly dozens of minor ones.

Play the game how you like, but what you're saying is untrue, I wish people would stop re-uttering complete fabrications on this website as if they won't be called on it. You will be.

 

[billd91]

1) Rest for 1 hour, do some jumping jacks for 5 minutes. Rest again. One fighter ability shouldn't force the DM to railroad players to not do whatever their characters want to do, including taking a long rest after unloading all spells and doing that each day. If players want to do that, they can and should be able to. It's legal. There should be only story ramifications of taking more time to rest than you probably should.

And any DM who allows such shenanigans deserves what he gets.

2) So the game is broken for the first 5 levels, which is around half of the levels that most campaigns attain (which is around ten). The game is half-broken then. Unless you enable 5 minute short rests, then it's completely broken wide open again. As many 4e fans on this thread are saying, they don't want unlimited healing back to full without it costing hit dice. Wizards goofed up here.

The game isn't even out yet. Do we really need to go through this rumor-mongering hysteria? If you're bound and determined to take your shots, why not hold your fire until the game is in the public's hands? Until then, you're shooting at assumptions and rumors and that's a waste of everyone's time.

 

[DDNFan]

There's really no incentive to take multiple short rests--if you have that much time to spare, why not just take a full rest and make everyone happy?

Can anyone give an actual example of a situation where this could be abused?

There is a big disincentive to taking a long rest instead of multiple short ones : you can only take one long rest per 24 hour period. You could take several 3-hour breaks in between action and the fighter could have 100% HP at the start of each battle, without even spending a single HD.

In my group's campaign it can be and will be. We have these things called way portals where we can rest between exploring the world. The most you can rest is a long rest, but also several short ones, in complete safety. This we have done also in the forest, so it's not inconceivable that we could benefit from surgeless healing on our fighter multiple times.

Put it this way. As a ranger, I have very limited healing in my Cure Wounds spells. I have cast it before on my own character, and the fighter and sometimes the rogue. If the fighter I never have to heal with Cure Wounds so long as the group takes 2 or 3 hours in between pushing forward, we can and will do that. It would be stupid not to. Not cheesy to do that, it would be mechanically stupid to enter combat and waste valuable daily spells that we might need later when we can't take those 3 hour rests.

Telling DMs to railroad adventurers is not a solution to this. It's systemic. We reported this issue in the playtests and they fixed it. And then un-fixed it. And now they're telling people that they play cheesy if they don't want to waste their character's daily resources when they don't have to, namely when their characters aren't being pursued (which happens, just not every time, all the time, which would be the truly cheesy thing and would cause all our players to quit if our DM did that to us to push us along).

Free surgeless healing, how could that be abused? Seriously? Man, you can't played D&D that much. We play in a VERY gritty high stakes campaign and every single spell and HD is treated as the precious little flower that it is. If we can benefit from the fighter healing himself for free by taking an extra hour while we wait, we will do that. And so should any smart group that is trying to survive against tough odds.

Put it this way, we fought a wyvern at level 1 (with a little help). We are up against an army of ogres with ogre magi chasing us, who are trying to awaken a terrasque. You must be kidding me if you think we wouldn't let our fighter heal up to preserve my cure wounds spells and his HD. The next time we get to rest we might only have the chance to rest for one hour, and spending HD needlessly the day before isn't a good option either, because you only get back half your HD the next morning. You are aware of that, aren't you? Have you played D&D Next at all? HD are precious, don't waste them, and don't spend them if you don't have to. Which, for a fighter, is never so long as you can rest a couple hours instead of for one hour.

Imagine Mike Mearls coming in to watch our gritty game here, and telling us we're playing the game wrong because I didn't want to waste my few cure wounds spells on the fighter when I could save it for myself or the rogue or the party wizard instead. It's baffling to me that that type of specious argument carries weight around here. It's an invalid one, as I've just shown in a real game example.

 

[Remathilis]

When you go below half HP you have injuries and are bleeding. Read the rules, it's right there in black and white. Hit points have always represented, in some fashion, and at some levels, actual wounds. Otherwise the action doesn't mean anything. And Cure Wounds doesn't cure wounds. And dying of a lethal, fatal injury is only a result of one hit instead of possibly dozens of minor ones.

So, you're not a fan of 4e's Warlord, I take it.

Or Pathfinder's Barbarian either, I'd wager.

 

[DDNFan]

And any DM who allows such shenanigans deserves what he gets.

DMs shouldn't have to railroad players around bugs in the game rules. We don't have to do jumping jacks to benefit from multiple short rests, as far as we know you can just do it.

You're right though, we don't know if there are any restrictions around taking multiple short rests. But their canned answer seems to be "you're playing the game wrong because we didn't anticipate a perfectly straightforward and logical thing that players might do".

Don't tell me my character is doing a shenanigan if he doesn't want to waste his cure wounds spells on the fighter, if we have the ability to rest one more hour and he gains the same thing for free. My character has a 14 intelligence, he ain't dumb. He sees the fighter can't really be injured and only gets "tired" and his wounds close or disappear without my magical assistance, if I just give it one more hour or two. It would be illogical for my character to do that, and for the fighter himself to spend hit dice when he doesn't need to either. He can count too, you know. Healing for the low low cost of 0 HD? Of course that's the logical thing to do, both in character and out of character. It's patronizing to tell us we're playing the game wrong when the basic fighter is designed this way. If it's a problem, the problem lies at the designer's feet, not ours.

It is not a valid argument to tell DMs to fix the game in-session by telling players they can't rest multiple hours at a time. That isn't cheesy, it's logical and rational. What's cheesy is the condescending and patronizing attitude of the developers who think that kind of specious argument has any merit. It doesn't. We're talking about the rules of the game here. Anything that every DM is going to have to correct going forward (because it's perfectly legal), should be corrected by the rules as per the latest L&L article. The problem I have with it is that people knew this to be a problem, they fixed it then they put the bug back into the game just by looking at how popular it was to give fighters minor action surgeless second wind.

The answer to why it's popular is, of course it would be popular, with players. Because it's a power gamer giveaway. Those things tend to be popular. Taking powers away or nerfing tends to be less popular, but it is the right thing to do anyway. Sometimes doing the right thing isn't popular, and that's why if they were only considering the popularity of surgeless healing for fighters, I or anyone else could have told you it would be.

At least the dwarf's second wind in 4th ed cost a surge to power it, and was limited by his total number of surges. This isn't. There are at least 16 hours of adventuring or short resting that one can do in a day. I can easily imagine a 5 minute combat requiring an hour or two or even weeks to recover from. Why wouldn't PCs take that time, if it were offered to them? Why should they press on, while still feeling the side effects from the previous battle, if they aren't under duress?

 

[am181d]

...We have these things called way portals where we can rest between exploring the world...

...Imagine Mike Mearls coming in to watch our gritty game here, and telling us we're playing the game wrong because I didn't want to waste my few cure wounds spells on the fighter when I could save it for myself or the rogue or the party wizard instead...

It sounds like your issues are related to non-standard elements featured in your campaign (the frequency of magical portals and general "gritty"-ness). Given that, I suspect the solution to your problem will be found with specialized modules in the DMG which reflect the difference between your campaign and the baseline.

I'm fully supportive of people playing D&D however they want, but if you are not in the majority, you should expect that you will need to tweak the system (ideally with "official" playtested options) to get the exact feel you want.

 

[DDNFan]

It sounds like your issues are related to non-standard elements featured in your campaign (the frequency of magical portals and general "gritty"-ness). Given that, I suspect the solution to your problem will be found with specialized modules in the DMG which reflect the difference between your campaign and the baseline.

I'm fully supportive of people playing D&D however they want, but if you are not in the majority, you should expect that you will need to tweak the system (ideally with "official" playtested options) to get the exact feel you want.

If we can take a long rest in the dungeon, or in the forest leading to it, then we can rest for two or three hours instead, surely.

It's humorous seeing all the rationalizations for this. They admitted it was an issue and supposedly the problem is when people play by the rules. The problem isn't us. It's the rules.

Let me ask you a question. If you bought a car that worked fine, but the manufacturer told you if you did a u-turn that the wheel would fall off, would you buy the car? Or make excuses for why it's "bad" drivers who are the problem, and not their engineering or quality control?

These rules are a product, and they have a glaring defect, for which we're told to plug it ourselves. And if we don't, then we're being cheesy. No, they're being lazy and passing the buck. We told them about these problems, they fixed them, then un-fixed them. They were aware last september when they issued the original fix for Second Wind that used temp HP. Even if in the final version it didn't use temp HP, but gave real HP but at least had a max # of uses per day, say, using the existing hit dice mechanic, then that would be fine too (on a game mechanics level, not a narrative one. Two separate issues).

 

[GX.Sigma]

Put it this way, we fought a wyvern at level 1 (with a little help). We are up against an army of ogres with ogre magi chasing us, who are trying to awaken a terrasque. You must be kidding me if you think we wouldn't let our fighter heal up to preserve my cure wounds spells and his HD. The next time we get to rest we might only have the chance to rest for one hour, and spending HD needlessly the day before isn't a good option either, because you only get back half your HD the next morning.

Okay, point taken. In a scenario where the PCs are constantly in mortal danger and only occasionally have a few hours to rest, the fighter can heal more than everyone else. Why is this a problem, though?

Side note: Have you seen the cleric's healing channel divinity?

 

[ThirdWizard]

Please consider this.

There are basically two different types of players arguing here. There are those who see the rules as a kind of world simulation. The PCs observe the simulation and act according to those rules. Then there are the players who see the rules as a way to figure out what happens when their PCs act, but the PCs will not observe those rules in any way.

So, this is basically not a productive conversation people are having.

Those who just see the rules as an adjudication method aren't going to see Second Wind as a problem. They aren't approaching the game from an angle where it would come up. They ask "What would my character do in this situation, assuming X fiction." The other group comes in and asks "What would my character do in this situation, assuming X world physics."

So, where people see a problem with multiple short rests and wonder why others don't see that problem, it is because the people who don't see it as a problem simply wouldn't have any reason to act that way. When you start with the fiction, instead of the rules, the rules work very well. Why? Because if it wouldn't occur to you to do X without reading the rules, then they aren't going to do X. They will see doing X as silly, from an in game perspective, and quite frankly nonsense.

Simple as that. Two different playstyles. No one is right. No need to argue.