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

[DDNFan]

I'm STILL just baffled as to where DDNfan has a problem. I've been DMing 4E game for two years. My party 'takes multiple short rests' all the time and it's never caused any problems. Even resting after a fight, healing with a cleric's help, and then resting again so that the cleric's encounter healing powers are back... it doesn't break the game because still requires the expenditure of a finite resource (Surges in 4E, Hit Dice in Next) and thus contributes to overall party attrition.

This is even less doable in DDN because 1) characters have fewer hit dice than they did surges in 4E, and 2) default short rests are an hour, meaning taking two in a row isn't really possible if the Bad Guy is about to unleash the demon horde at the stroke of midnight and it's 10:52PM. I mean I guess your players could still do that, but then by all means, they have to fight the demon horde as well as the bad guy.

You shouldn't be criticizing my critique, because actually Second Wind, as written, breaks the 4e-ified version of 5th far worse than it does the default game. Then fighters become insanely powerful, effectively unkillable with zero healing cost other than a few 5 minute chunks.

Good luck trying to run a 4e-style 5th edition game where fighters have full HP all day long, without even having to spend hit dice as a limitation. Then add a life cleric where everyone in the group starts at 50% before they add their own free healing on top.

Imagine a group of fighter X with one 3rd level cleric who, before even activating Second Wind after a short rest, are at 50% or close to it. Suddenly your argument about Second Wind not being enough is moot, since a few minutes later, regardless, everyone is at max HP without spending a single daily spell.

If you still don't understand why this is broken, who am I to contradict you? You're welcome to your own beliefs. But I remember when they nerfed the artificer of his surgeless heals in 4e, and the same errata is going to happen.

I'm going to go start a thread now about Wounds and Vitality, because I've stated by opinion enough already.

 

[Lalato]

I'm going to go start a thread now about Wounds and Vitality, because I've stated by opinion enough already.

Thank the gods!

 

[Tovec]

I know! I remember the time our half-orc barbarian was fighting a red dragon. The dragon decided to go hide in a lava flow, so the barbarian used his mighty rage + amulet of mighty constitution to jump in after it and fought the dragon while standing in waist-deep lava. Totally destroyed our verisimilitude. Grittiness was all gone. I can't believe D&D next allowed this!

Then I remembered I was playing 3.5

A barbarian doesn't "use" mighty rage so much as have the effect. Same goes for the amulet.
An amulet of might constitution doesn't exist (according to SRD). I'll swap this for an amulet of Mighty Health +6

But okay, assuming average rolls all around. BEST case scenario.

Half-Orc with let's say a 18 CON.
While raging would gain +8, with a +6 amulet.
That is a total Constitution of 32 or a bonus on HP per level of 11.
D12 HD. Average roll, plus max first: 12+11*20+6.5*19=12+220+95=327hp.

The situation you describe is dealing 20d6 points of lava per turn. 70hp/turn. So the MAX OUT barbarian at 20th level can survive approximately 4.5 rounds in lava fighting a dragon. I'll agree that that is a long time. But then I remember that most characters will NEVER have that many HP or a chance of that. And I remember that simply jumping into the lava then crawling back out on the same round would get him nearly as dead.* And that this is probably a fault of lava since the same fault exists with jumping off cliffs. Of course without taking into account damage he took before. Or the damage the dragon does once he jumps into the lava.

And I realize that this is probably not equal to a minor power of a dwarf at level 1 that can be used against the entire game (I assume, I don't know the power or 4e well enough specifically). Since this is only one power at first level the accurate representation I think would be a half-orc at first level without his amulet of mighty health. Who lasts under a round because it is lava. But then again I just like comparing apples to apples.

But yes, that would be verisimilitude breaking - if it weren't for the maxed out HP'd half-orc barbarian at 20th level. Any other character dies in roughly one round, or certainly by the time they get out of the lava.* Yeah, given all that, it doesn't break my immersion to have such a specialized character win at their specialization. Versus a dwarf with a singular power they get for free (right?).


* 20d6 first round, getting out continues it for 1d3 rounds after. So approx 175hp if he does nothing but jump in and then leave.

 

[Manbearcat]

I'm finding myself longing for the days of Gorgoroth and his sock puppet(s).

 

[The Black Ranger]

I am an "HP as basically meat" person, and I have no issue with the Second Wind recovering HP as I have no problem with a Fighter saying, basically, "That damage you did to me? I'm going to ignore it. I am THAT TOUGH."

For a less intense version, the idea someone mentioned earlier in the thread, of an equivalent action that can grant you THP sounds like a good fix.

There's no need to get into the weeds on "WHAT ARE HP REALLY!?!?!?!". If this ability doesn't work for you for whatever reason it shouldn't be a big deal to replace it with something that does.

Works fine for me, though, and I do view losing HP as actually taking some injury.

Ever heard someone say "ignoring something won't make it go away"? This is where THP is perfect and not HP. Ignoring the wounds are fine and should carry you through the fight, but those wounds should still be there afterwards and effect you when the adrenaline has stopped pumping.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

And this is an easy DM call. Relax folks! Just be a DM and make the call already. We'll all be just fine.

This is an easy DM call, I agree. The call is "short rests take a fixed time period" (default 1hr), and that this notion of "1+ hrs" metagame bullcrap. The problem is, I am allegedly being told by the designer that this easy and logical call, which avoids metagaming and similar nonsense, apparently "breaks the game".

If 5E is that brittle, it's the most brittle of all D&D editions, which is very sad.

 

[pemerton]

Ever heard someone say "ignoring something won't make it go away"? This is where THP is perfect and not HP. Ignoring the wounds are fine and should carry you through the fight, but those wounds should still be there afterwards and effect you when the adrenaline has stopped pumping.

This is not how temp hp work (in the playtest, or 4e, or as best I know 3E, or in AD&D with the Aid spell).

Temp hp which are lost due to taking damage are no more temporary than real hit points. They just never come back.

What you are describing is an effect which, as far as I know, was prominent for barbarians in 3E but otherwise has never been a big part of the game: the character gets a hp boost = to X, then after a certain amount of time suffers damage = to X.

If you're going to do second wind this way, rather than a hit point boost = to X, it should be healing = to X, because that is what makes it a second wind rather than a first wind. Then after a certain amount of time (say, after combat finishes) the character suffers damage = to X.

The obvious issue with this is that it makes second wind much weaker than it currently is. It becomes a "diehard" style ability rather than self-healing. Whereas I assume that what made it popular in the playtest is that it is self-healing.

 

[pemerton]

I realize that this is probably not equal to a minor power of a dwarf at level 1 that can be used against the entire game (I assume, I don't know the power or 4e well enough specifically).

<snip>

But yes, that would be verisimilitude breaking - if it weren't for the maxed out HP'd half-orc barbarian at 20th level. Any other character dies in roughly one round, or certainly by the time they get out of the lava.* Yeah, given all that, it doesn't break my immersion to have such a specialized character win at their specialization. Versus a dwarf with a singular power they get for free (right?).

I don't know what you mean by "for free". A 20th level barbarian gets its abilities for free too, right? All it has to do is turn up as a 20th level barbarian, just like the dwarf just has to turn up as a dwarf.

But given that, as you state, you don't know the 4e dwarf's special ability, I don't see how you're in a position to judge whether or not it affects grittiness or verisimilitude. (Personally, I think a dwarf fighter gritting his teeth and fighting on is pretty gritty. And fits with standard fantasy tropes pretty well.)

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Finally, here's the part that will hopefully end the conversation; the game works perfectly fine even if you do chain short rests together. Because most groups will find a way to heal up between fights anyway. The fighter buys 20+ healing potions instead. Or whatever. I've let my players chain short rests together; and while the fighter and a couple of other classes love it, it doesn't really help them out all that much once you get into combat.

I'm glad to hear that, because that reflects my experience from the playtesting I did, but it's pretty worrying that the designer of the edition apparently disagrees. Of course, designers are surprisingly frequently wrong about their own designs!

Personally, it's important to have short rests be a fixed period, not a minimum-indefinite one because the latter is going to trigger not only my "metagame bullcrap" sensor, but worse, that of pretty much all my players. They're all hard-working people who are good at time management, so the moment they notice that you can rest for N period (default 1hr) and get X benefits, but if you rest longer, you don't gain any further benefits unless you magically transmute the game into another "game state" (so computer-game-y...) before resting again, they're going to be irked.

Irked because we have metagame bullcrap disarmament in my games. As Umbran quoted Will Smith "My attitude is: Don't start nothin', won't BE nothin'". That's how we roll regarding metagame crap like this. I don't do it, they don't do it. If one side started doing it, the other would be completely within their rights to respond with some of their own.

If you really couldn't chain short rests, if, as Mearls apparently said, they really broke the game, then 5E would be "firing the first shot" on my behalf here, and I wouldn't have a leg to stand on, ethically, to claim my metagame stuff was fine, but theirs wasn't.

Also, a lot of the proposed solutions make sense if you have 1hr "short rests", but 1hr isn't a short rest. It's a bloody lunchbreak! All through 5E's playtesting and development, we were told that we could adjust the length of short rests - that 5 minutes and 1hr and anything in-between would be viable, playable, acceptable ways to handle it. So I've been assuming 5E could handle 5/10 minute short rests, rather than the PCs having a fraking picnic every time they need to bandage some wounds or take a breather!

So here's to hoping you're right, and Mearls was either talking about an earlier version, or is wrong, or exaggerating (or didn't say it and is being misreported!). There's just no way I'm going to try to enforce some sort of computer-game-esque "game state change" deal to push a wedge between breaks. If they want to keep resting, fine. I'd rather house-rule specific abilities that cause a problem than turn my table into a table of "game state changes"!

(What does still bug me, though, is that this absolutely wasn't a problem in the playtests, and seems to have been introduced entirely after them. None of the playtests had abilities which allowed you to always refill to a certain amount of HP with no resource cost other than time, and let's be real, time is only a costly resource sometimes in D&D, rather than all the time, that I recall, though maybe the Channel Divinity issue was there and I missed it in the morass of Cleric abilities. So why did they suddenly decide to redesign these abilities so that they did cause an issue?)

 

[Thaumaturge]

I typed up a nice response.

And then decided I just don't care to get (more?) involved in the Short Rest War (SRW).

I probably need to take a nice walk.

Thaumaturge.