D&D General How has D&D changed over the decades?

[Vaalingrade]

Then call me a super.

I hate that we constantly have to go over this.

Only some HP damage is wounds.
And the wounds are minor because the wounds don't affect the the character's effectiveness until they accumulate enough to cause a fatal slip up
Thus the minor wounds can be healed in a day of sleep

I cut my finger yesterday with a blade. Today the wound is "healed". It no longer hurts and it's bleeding. Am I super?

D&D HP damage was never supposed to represent heavy damage on a humaniod PC. Only the last hit is. PCs healedslow becauseGygas intended you toplay your other PCs as you hurt PCs healed. Remember in Gygax' campaigns, if your 31 HP fighter took 30 damage, it took 30 real time days to play. Real Earth Third Planet from Sun Time. You couldn't play with your fighter for a month in no one healed casted magic on it. You had to switch characters, roll a new PC, or bribe the DM. HP damage wasn't to represent guts comng out. It was a gimimick to force to you run multiple PCs and not attach too hard. That's why 0e and 1e didn't care if your PC was overpowered. If you 50 HP paladin took 28 damage, you cannot play him for 4 weeks anyway.

Simulationism has never been about actual reality, but just the wielder's perception of reality.

That's why there's always pushback against physical feats that don't even approach world records --because a lot of us (self included) are sad dumpling people who make suspicious noises getting off the couch and some of those can't imagine a world where even an in his prime Arnold could lift and throw a man because of it.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Taking 8 hours to regenerate all wounds is a remarkably low end super power. The actual supers that make an issue about regeneration do so in minutes, if not less. And generating fire unlimitedly only looks like a superpower if the fire is potent enough anyone cares. Just being able to do it doesn't say anything.

Firebolt alone is more than enough to torch a building full of ordinary people at a distance. And you can do it all day.

 

[Cadence]

Firebolt alone is more than enough to torch a building full of ordinary people at a distance. And you can do it all day.

Did all day cantrips start with PF and 4e?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Then call me a super.

I hate that we constantly have to go over this.

Only some HP damage is wounds.
And the wounds are minor because the wounds don't affect the the character's effectiveness until they accumulate enough to cause a fatal slip up
Thus the minor wounds can be healed in a day of sleep

I cut my finger yesterday with a blade. Today the wound is "healed". It no longer hurts and it's bleeding. Am I super?

D&D HP damage was never supposed to represent heavy damage on a humaniod PC. Only the last hit is. PCs healedslow becauseGygas intended you toplay your other PCs as you hurt PCs healed. Remember in Gygax' campaigns, if your 31 HP fighter took 30 damage, it took 30 real time days to play. Real Earth Third Planet from Sun Time. You couldn't play with your fighter for a month in no one healed casted magic on it. You had to switch characters, roll a new PC, or bribe the DM. HP damage wasn't to represent guts comng out. It was a gimimick to force to you run multiple PCs and not attach too hard. That's why 0e and 1e didn't care if your PC was overpowered. If you 50 HP paladin took 28 damage, you cannot play him for 4 weeks anyway.

There are certain attacks, like poison, that definitely require physical damage to be sustained for them to make any sense. Also, this argument does not address why you need so much more healing magic to fully heal a high level character. Do you get "more tired" as you advance as a PC?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Well as this change, you have to look at the junk we don't want to take from under the lampshade because we don't want to deal with the aftermath to the S of D.

I mean.... half the major changes in D&D over the years all come going from the Assumption of Running Multiple Expendable PCs to Assumption of Running One Not so Expendable PC.

Few realize or are willing to vocalize the reason why 4e and 5e PCs are harder to kill. Tougher PCs who don't randomly die, aren't icky gray morally, and don't take off months of a time make better stories.

0e, 1e, and early 2e PCs had stories. But in the purely narrative literal sense, their stories were often terrible. They almost never follow a writting curve nd they usually exist in plotless or weak plot stories unless the DM forced the plot AND fudged dice. You write down a Old D&D PC's life and hand it to a English teacher and you were getting a F back. D+ if you rolled well.

The funny thing is, the people who don't want to vocalize why these changes were made include the game designers.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I dunno. That's actually fairly realistic. Most people when they take a wound (beyond simple cuts and scratches) take weeks or months to recover, if they ever do, and never go back to the type of situation that saw them wounded in the first place. Barring a few exceptions, soldiers are usually healthy or dead. It's completely unbelievable that someone would be taking multiple threatening wounds, repeatedly, over and over again, and never suffering a single lingering effect.

Good grief, I almost lost my hand to a freaking splinter when I was in my 20's. Spent two weeks in the hospital and major surgery plus months of rehab to get the use of my hand back. People taking repeated stab wounds, bites and whatnot and never getting so much as a fever despite a complete lack of modern medicine?

Sorry, no, not buying that.

On the other hand, PC regularly do "take a wound", drop to 0hp, then get back up six seconds later and keep fighting. And this is likely to happen many times over their career.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Ain't that the rub? If HP = meat, then a high level warrior is nearly immune to weapons. If HP doesn't = meat, you can't survive a fall from a high place. It's almost like HP is completely abstract and can't represent anything in the fiction.

And yet no version of D&D says that hit points are completely abstract and don't represent anything in the fiction. They keep trying to have it both ways.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Did all day cantrips start with PF and 4e?

4e at least.

 

[Helldritch]

All hp are meat and none of them are. It is both at the same time.
Let's take a classic example I give to any new players.
An orc swings an axe at an NPC.
Case 1. The NPC is a commoner, 6 hp. The axe does 11 damages. The NPC is down, dying.
Case 2. The NPC is a veteran of many battles (use veteran's stats). The axe does 11 damages. The veteran's shield got the block barely in time. The elbow/shoulder have a strained muscle, a small bruise or contusion. Nothing serious, but it will hurt a few days. The veteran replies with a few thrusts of his.
Case 3. The NPC is a legend, a high level barbarian. The axe does 11 damages. The barbarian manages to deflect the head blow resulting in a small scratch on his shoulder. With a grumble, the barb presses on his own attacks.

In all three cases, a wound was inflicted. The difference is the severity of that wound. The higher the level, the smaller the wound. This explains why poisoned weapons will apply their poison on a hit, why cure wound is actually called cure wound and why magical healing is so impressive. Not because you can do it in combat. Because such strains should take days and weeks to actually heal. A high level character dies a death by a thousand cuts until the fatal blow.

 

[payn]

Did all day cantrips start with PF and 4e?

The PF ones were not that great outside utility. The damage was like 1D3 and never increased so you didn't really every use it beyond level 1.