CubicsRube
Hero
I feel comfort that long after I'm gone, some yet to be born kid will reply to a post of mine on how to "fix HP" or something or other.Hit point threads....hit point threads never change.
I feel comfort that long after I'm gone, some yet to be born kid will reply to a post of mine on how to "fix HP" or something or other.Hit point threads....hit point threads never change.
Sure, but I'd do the opposite; have hit points recover quickly, say on a short rest. Give a larger pool of spells and special abilities but have them recharge on a long rest, which can easily be multiple days in a civilized place (or at least safe).I also think splitting the hit dice / wound recovery part of the Rest system from the "getting back spell slots" and other class feature recovery part of the Rest system could attempt to fix the problem. But I think we all know what would happen if we did that-- if hit point recovery was on a 7-day long rest reset and spells were on an overnight long rest reset... not a single gaming group would ever hit that 7-day wound reset. Everyone would just sleep overnight, get all their slots back, blow them all immediately to heal everyone as much as possible using magic, then sit on their hands for the day to start adventuring the next day when they get their spells back. Sure, it solves the "narrative" issue that it's no longer natural recovery that heals everyone's wounds, it's now "magic!"... but at least speaking personally, that is such an inconsequential narrative difference. The result is absolutely the same... everyone starts their adventuring day at full. The only difference is "magic" rather than the pseudo-real-world "laws of physics" that so many players seem to need in their game. So long as you can shout "Magic!", then apparently it's okay to narratively break all the rules of the natural world. But if you can't shout "Magic!", then people for some reason need the rules of our natural world to be upheld. And I have found that to be a rather ridiculous need myself.
(a) of course adventures not plotted for Gritty rests don't plot well with Gritty rests.The plot can rarely withstand characters sitting out for an entire week. It destroys the flow of any story. So no DM is going to enjoy trying to create adventures with them now having that one hand tied behind their back. Believe me... I tried running Curse of Strahd with 7-day long-rest rules in place, and the story took a beating. So much of it made little to no sense that the PCs just had to set up a camp and twiddle their thumbs for a week as the world passed them by so that they could "heal naturally".
My starting point in response to this: what does need to go back to civilisation mean?I don't think there's an answer to D&D players preferring combat over narrative. (And as one of those players, I don't really want an answer, either!) I do think there's a possible answer to the rest issue by divorcing hit points (which represent combat readiness) from the greater pool of resources. 4e had the right idea by letting hit points recover easily, but healing surges powered hit points and recovered more slowly. Personally, I also favor tying more of the PC's power to consumables, and less to personal abilities. If you want your full allotment of abilities, you need to go back to civilization and procure ink and paper for scrolls, buy new potions, etc.
To start with the last paragraph: my own view is that once we look at this through the lens of actual game play it makes very little sense for magic - which is just an in-fiction label applied to a certain set of player resources - to be a device for freely circumventing whatever we think the recovery rules should be. This is one thing 4e got right: eg even at high levels, the players using Hallowed Temple to force a long rest requires non-negligible resource expenditure. (At least that is how it was experienced in our game.)The problem comes down to trying to align both "in-game narrative" and "out-of-game mechanics". As I said above, players sitting "out-of-game" will never voluntarily send their PCs forward to adventure at less than full HP because they know that the game is built from the ground up for combat to be its primary focus. And no one is going to voluntarily start their combat day with one hand tied behind their back. Which is why the game rules make it easy for players to heal their PCs hit points fully-- the players were going to do that anyway.
So with that being said... the only other thing to do is to try and put together some kind of "in-game narrative" reason to do so. Oftentimes its the "gritty" long rest rules of 7 days for a LR getting thrown about. But the problem with that is that while it makes the narrative of wound recover make a little more sense... it usually destroys all the other aspects of narrative and in-game story. The plot can rarely withstand characters sitting out for an entire week. It destroys the flow of any story.
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I'd rather have the plot make more sense and be more compelling by letting PCs reset quicker than try and worry about the "reality" of how fast wounds recovered. Especially considering the other "in-game" reality that we have all these characters that can throw magic at the problem as much as they want to heal wounds just up until the "out-of-game balancing system" of spell slots says those characters are all out and cannot heal anymore and thus they now all have to camp for 7 days to get all their "stuff" back.
Well, I'd start off by saying I'm envisioning this purely in terms of gamist considerations, narrative is put in place to support the needs of the game play.Does it mean conceding a loss? This is the 13th Age and Moldvay Basic approach: you leave "civilisation" with a finite pool of resources (spells, hps, gear) and you go on your adventure, and if you can't win your adventure with that pool of resources then you have lost, and have to go back to recover resources with your tail between your legs. (Moldvay Basic is a bit less up-front about this and leaves it as an implication; 13th Age just comes right out and says it.)
No, the idea is that civilization is clearly telegraphed to the players. Indeed, the characters are provided with a magical way to return home when desired, to give the players more control. Also, death is intended to be much less likely, the rules are changed such that going to 0 only causes injury. This is to encourage players to extend the characters into greater risk, and thus greater reward.Does it mean waiting for the GM to tell you that civilisation is available? This is largely how I approached things in my 4e play: as GM I regulated the pacing of extended rests by regulating the availability of resting places. There were a few points of player input: skill challenge successes could expedite that availability; player choices could push things to "just one more fight" within a given pool of resources; and - at higher levels - a player decision to spend resources on a Hallowed Temple could make civilisation immediately available to them. But the notions of win and loss were not really apposite, except on the margins: the players knew that I was framing challenges having a pretty keen eye on their available resources. What was mostly going on here was pacing. Even when the players were making the call, it was largely about their sense of how much more do we feel like proving the point that we can go on on the smell of an oily rag? In some cases this can start to bleed into a version of the previous paragraph: if the players decide to call it quits and take a rest, they are giving the GM licence to narrate that the world moves on in some way that is at odds with the players' (and their PCs') desires. Of non-D&D systems, Burning Wheel works quite a bit like this.
Yes, I'm framing this specifically in a gamist/challenge perspective. There is very much a "hidden board" aspect here.Does it mean having to succeed at some sort of ingame challenge? As per my previous paragraphs there were hints of this in some of my 4e play, but only on the margins. A game where it moves from margins to centre seems to me to run the risk of tedium: the point of spending our resources is to get the chance to recover our resources. Maybe some hex-crawling sort of play could be the non-tedious version of this, as there are trade-offs between doing other stuff but keeping enough in reserve to get home. I think it is, as a practical matter, pretty hard to run this sort of game without having it turn into GM decides - at least in the D&D context, where it is the GM who exercises so much control over what the "other stuff" is and hence how resource-draining it will tend to be.
We had a necromancer in our midst...
But the points made were valid. I personally go for half HD recover and no hp restored unless HD are spent. This is more than enough.
This sort of leads to a death spiral.Also, adventure sites are designed to be one-off, whether that be due to intelligent enemies moving their lair and gathering reinforcements, or the gate to Faerie only being open during the new moon. The amount of resources that can be gathered from an adventure increases as the adventure moves; the first part of the adventure might only have 10% of the available treasure, the second part 20%, the third part 30%, and the most difficult part 40%. Sometimes the adventure design is more linear, sometimes it has more of a wing structure to let the players decide what to tackle first. Crucially, if they fail and decide to retreat, that means the rest of the adventure is closed. Maybe that location is still available in the narrative, but subsequent visits will change what is available to be gathered and encountered. As such, whenever the PCs retreat, they will lose something due to the need for upkeep and the loss of time, but ideally they will have gained enough to offset this and progress. Adventures are specifically designed so that completion is not necessary to offset upkeep and give progress, finishing the entire adventure will grant a large reward and a large positive bonus within the narrative.
That's not the only other thing to do. You correctly identified the tension between "in-game narrative" and "out-of-game mechanics", but chose the wrong bullet to bite. Do what 13th Age does and connect rest to an out-of-game schedule. Remove the players' ability to decide when they can rest and sever the idea of "rest" from the in-game narrative. That's what I do in my game and it works great.The problem comes down to trying to align both "in-game narrative" and "out-of-game mechanics". As I said above, players sitting "out-of-game" will never voluntarily send their PCs forward to adventure at less than full HP because they know that the game is built from the ground up for combat to be its primary focus. And no one is going to voluntarily start their combat day with one hand tied behind their back. Which is why the game rules make it easy for players to heal their PCs hit points fully-- the players were going to do that anyway.
So with that being said... the only other thing to do is to try and put together some kind of "in-game narrative" reason to do so.