D&D 4E Ben Riggs' "What the Heck Happened with 4th Edition?" seminar at Gen Con 2023

[pemerton]

So in AD&D, a 1st level or zero-level character loses (say) 3 hp from being stabbed by a spear. There's a real chance that they are now unconscious and dying, or even dead. If they are still alive, they are probably one blow away from unconsciousness and/or death.

On the other hand, we know - from Gygax's rulebooks - that a 10th level fighter who has lost (say) 30 hp in a fight with 10 spear wielding Orcs is merely scratched and winded. The many hit points in the mechanical description of this character represent, in the fiction, their skill, luck and divine favour in avoiding damaging strikes.

So far, so good.

But the low level character can be healed hale and hearty by curing their light wound. Huh? What light wound?

Whereas a high priest, able to raise the dead, cannot bring the high level character back to full health - curing their critical wound still leaves them scratched and winded. Huh? What critical wound?

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The idea that 4e introduces too much abstraction compared to AD&D just isn't an idea I can credit. What I've just described isn't just abstract. It's incoherent.

On the other hand, 4e isn't incoherent at all. The high level fighter can more easily regain (say) 30 of their 100 hp than the low level character can regain (say) 20 of their 22 hp. And it requires far less divine intervention for that to happen, than it takes to bring someone back from the dead.

 

[Alzrius]

For us to say hit points are meat, then we have to accept the fact that a 10th level character with 100 hit points can withstand punishment akin to movie action heroes without any noticeable depreciation in their ability to act, which is no more or less realistic than hit points not being strictly "meat".

I don't know who "us" is, but I'm certainly not saying that "hit points are meat." Rather, it's that hit point loss is representative of (physical) injury. You can certainly scale that in proportion to the total hit points that a character has – e.g. that 8 hit points of damage from a longsword is a mortal wound to a 1st-level commoner, but little more than a scratch to Conan the Barbarian (as described in a blog linked to upthread) – but it's still physical injury either way.

And the idea that D&D characters are withstanding punishment akin to action movie heroes is a viewpoint that's not only acceptable (at least to my mind), but entirely justified within the context of the game. In a world with fire-breathing dragons, vampire lords, demon princes, etc. PCs should be action movie heroes, especially at higher levels.

 

[Alzrius]

I guess I don't see how...

"your blows are forceful enough to damage things in circumstances where other people can't (i.e.: on a miss unsuccessfull attack roll)"

is meaningfully different than..

To me, it's because one is an extension of how the flavor/mechanics already goes (i.e. you're dodging something), whereas the other one is a counterintuitive reversal of what the flavor/mechanics are telling us is happening (i.e. you missed the opponent...but still damaged them).

 

[Gammadoodler]

To me, it's because one is an extension of how the flavor/mechanics already goes (i.e. you're dodging something), whereas the other one is a counterintuitive reversal of what the flavor/mechanics are telling us is happening (i.e. you missed the opponent...but still damaged them).

Except that this flavor is, at best, inconsistent. A tarrasque isn't dodging your attacks you aren't failing to make contact

Ultimately what is happening, mechanically, is that your attack was unsuccessful. Why it was unsuccessful is pure narration.

Applying damage on that unsuccessful attack would just be alternative narration.

Maybe it's "you didn't strike true but still got a piece of them"

Maybe it's "stinging wind from the force of your swing"

Maybe it's "they caught a whiff of your body odor"

It all can work narratively. Nothing is breaking down in any fundamental way.

 

[MichaelSomething]

To me, it's because one is an extension of how the flavor/mechanics already goes (i.e. you're dodging something), whereas the other one is a counterintuitive reversal of what the flavor/mechanics are telling us is happening (i.e. you missed the opponent...but still damaged them).

But AC isn't all dodging. Otherwise, wearing plate mail would make you weave through attacks like Jackie Chan??
AC is your total defensive ability, comprised of several factors.
You could make damage on a "miss" more conditional to make it narratively fit more, but most would find it a waste of time to add another step to combat turns just to see if you deal 2 damage. Just making it happen helps ease of use.

 

[Micah Sweet]

You don't.. if you accept the mechanical elements as they are (insofar as they are internally consistent), when you craft the narrative in the first place.

The "problem", in my experience, comes when you map in outside, typically real-world, expectations, which have no intrinsic or necessary connection to your fantasy setting.

The GM is in control of the settings they create. If they want a different setting experience than the rules facilitate, they should expect problems.

Besides all this, generally speaking, the concept we were talking about has been AC, which has no real narrative heft. It is "generic protection against attacks", and it protects an abstraction in "hit points".

Suggesting that an ability exists where you can bypass generic defense to degrade an abstraction should not require narrative justification. Like this is 100% rules abstraction BS.

I've only provided one such justification to illustrate how easy it is.

Which is why I'd prefer these things to be more codified and less abstracted (not completely unabstracted, but less so).

 

[Alzrius]

Except that this flavor is, at best inconsistent. A tarrasque isn't dodging your attacks you aren't failing to make contact

Ultimately what is happening, mechanically, is that your attack was unsuccessful. Why it was unsuccessful is pure narration.

Applying damage on that unsuccessful attack would just be alternative narration.

Maybe it's "you didn't strike true but still got a piece of them"

Maybe it's "stinging wind from the force of your swing"

Maybe it's "they caught a whiff of your body odor"

It all can work narratively. Nothing is breaking down in any fundamental way.

I'm not sure what a "fundamental" breakdown would be, short of the entire game engine somehow crashing, but I'm saying that the consistent ability to damage an opponent on a missed attack – literally, with every missed attack – requires a narrative justification for how that's happening (particularly if it means that you're always connecting somehow, negating the "don't connect with the enemy at all" part of AC, at least if we accept that hit point loss means an injury is dealt). Moreover, that this justification is no small thing, since otherwise it can introduce a disconnect between the flavor text and the mechanics that some players find unpleasant because it brings them out of the immersive aspect of play.

I'll say again that this line is going to be different for everyone, and that's okay. No one's trying to convince anyone of anything here, except perhaps to understand why we're coming from where we're coming from.

 

[Micah Sweet]

You mean like with hit point loss, the absence of a death spiral, cure wound spells, etc?

There are systems that do what you want, but I just don't see how D&D is one of them! It seems like you should be playing Runequest.

These are issues of degree.

 

[James Gasik]

When the guy with 8 Dexterity wearing full plate is attacked in melee, it's hard to say that an attack "missed" them. They are most assuredly being hit, it's simply that the armor protected them. "Damage on a miss" could be an armor-piercing attack; certainly there are things that one could imagine as being able to pierce armor. That one would rather have such an attack modeled by either granting a high bonus to the attack roll or ignoring AC entirely as opposed to dealing a small amount of damage on a miss is ultimately the same thing-

You're still looking at how many attacks it takes to kill someone. Anything that increases the average damage you deal over time kills them faster, regardless of the mechanics used to get there.

Consider that you have a 60% chance to hit an opponent. Your attacks deal, on average, 8.5 damage. You have an ability like the proposed Graze weapon mastery that lets you deal 4 damage that 40% of the time you would "miss". This increases your average damage from (55% to deal 8.5 damage [4.675] and 5% chance to deal 13 damage [0.65 for a total of 5.325]) to 7.125.

You could get roughly the same benefit by increasing your chance to hit by 3-4 points. Advantage, which the game hands out like candy, would provide an even larger boost.

Bottom line, dead is dead, so if there's a mechanic that models killing a foe faster, does it really matter how it goes about doing it?

I would say no, but obviously there are people who feel that there are certain assumptions in how the end goal should be achieved. They would reject Graze out of hand, because they visualize combat is literally being hits and misses, but might not bat an eye at a magic sword that has an enchantment that causes it to fire a single magic missile at any foe it fails to connect with.

 

[Alzrius]

But AC isn't all dodging. Otherwise, wearing plate mail would make you weave through attacks like Jackie Chan??
AC is your total defensive ability, comprised of several factors.

Right, but one of those factors is dodging. Even in plate mail, you can conceivably avoid an attack to the extent that if the opponent rolls a 2 on the die, you can say that it's a clumsy swing which you easily sidestep...except they still damaged you.

You could make damage on a "miss" more conditional to make it narratively fit more, but most would find it a waste of time to add another step to combat turns just to see if you deal 2 damage. Just making it happen helps ease of use.

Sure, I agree that adding more mechanical aspects to make it fit might not be worthwhile in terms of practical aspects of play. But that's a separate issue from the narrative disconnect involved.