Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
Well reasoned.
D&D General How has D&D changed over the decades?
- Thread starter Morrus
- Start date
overgeeked
Open-World Sandbox
That's exactly what I meant. You said it better. My "weird assumption that DM's can't react" is your "DM's are tired of being vilified for it". When DM's react to player cheese, the players vilify the DM. Hence, there's a "weird assumption that DM's can't react".
It's a result of how 5e has almost everything tuned so deeply in favor of the PCs. {Cs don't need anything from the GM & the GM doesn't have any areas they can give ground to make the players feel like there is give & take in the best interests of the game so the GM has to be the bad guy at the table for making things work.
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
Which all sounds great until the players/PCs decide at the last minute to go somewhere else, or take a vastly different route, or turn back for town after rescuing the three veterans; and then you're right back to winging it...
overgeeked
Open-World Sandbox
For me the split is infinite over-night healing. I don't know 3X well enough to say if it has superhero healing or not, but if it does, then I'd lump it together with 4E and 5E under that superhero fantasy label. Earlier editions of D&D very quickly developed into their own thing that wasn't really reflected in the fantasy fiction. Way too much fighting, worrying about resource management, delving dungeons for loot, etc. That's not reflected in the wider fantasy fiction. Sure, bits and pieces are, but all together? Outside of D&D branded or D&D mimicking media? Nope. But what happens when over 50 years you constantly ratchet up the power scale of the characters? You go from gritty faux sword and sorcery, to heroic fantasy, to epic fantasy, to superhero fantasy. Almost none of their powers are imbued from magic items any more. Everyone's just amazingly special and awesome...because. It's weird to me coming from old school D&D, but it is what it is. It's clearly here to stay, so it's get onboard or shuffle off to the old-folk's home clutching my AD&D books.
3.x was very much not easy overnight healing. Characters got back a given number of HP/character level depending on what they were doing & if they had the faster healing feat. The default was
- strenuous activity 0hp recovered (zero). that jumped to 1/level with faster healing.
- Light activity: 1hp/level recovered. That jumped to 1.5/level with faster healing
- Complete bed rest: 1.5hp/level recovered. That jumped to 2/level with faster healing
- With another character/NPC providing long term care (IE medicine skill & several hours dedicated to it iirc) that was 0/2/3 per level depending on activity level without faster healing & 2/3/4 per level with long term care & faster healing.
- There was also ability score damage recovery that was not easy.
- There is a handy table in the faster healing feat link
overgeeked
Open-World Sandbox
I have been digging though my books and I've come to a bit of a realization about this. It boils down to "add, don't subtract."
It's a losing proposition to mangle things in and cut things from the current edition to mimic the play of older editions. The players will rebel, the DM will be unhappy...and it will all collapse. It's a waste of time, really. But, instead, you embrace the thing for what it is. You as the DM can freely add material to the game and almost no one will complain, but if you try to remove things, that almost never goes over well. The book says the player gets that toy at that level for picking that thing. So let them have it. There's a few things that are just broken, that's not what I'm talking about. But the best solution seems to be: work around it. Add, don't subtract. Infinite dragons.
So instead of removing this or that, or mangling the adventuring day or destroying short/long rests to evoke a bygone age of D&D...you add to what's already there to get vaguely close to the same results. The numbers aren't absolutes. They don't mean anything in isolation. It's only by comparison to each other that they matter. That a 1st-level character has 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, or 75 hit points doesn't matter in isolation. It's only in relation to the monsters and their damage that PC hp matters. Through that context.
You want to make your 5E game more grimdark and scary...beef up the monsters to be nasty, dangerous, and challenging to baseline 5E PCs. Add, don't subtract. The players get to have the experience you're trying to give them while not having to deal with you taking their toys away. Just ignore that this is literally the escalation problem and likely exactly why we have the current issues with 5E. The designers just keep adding and adding and adding.
PCs blowing through your monsters? Add more. Beef their hit points. Drop some 4E monsters on their heads. PCs pulling a five-minute workday? Add more. The next encounter is beefed up because they waited an extra 8 hours before tackling the next thing.
MichaelSomething
Legend
Did your party have a wand of cure light wounds?
sometimes they has quite a few. Unlike a long or short rest however an NPC could simply declare "nope, all sold out, I sold you my last one not too long ago". Beyond that was the fact that players didn't want to use them because every 750gp wand of CLW was 750 gp they were not able to spend on awesome magic items in a system that expected them.
A wand of CLW was 50x 1d8+1, between short rest HD+con mod*level & long rest all PCs recover full HP+recover half HD the wand pales in power.
Vaalingrade
Legend
It's not healing because HP is not wounds. It has never been wounds. And assertions that it is and then that it makes things 'bad' is a self-inflicted wound.
Similar Threads
