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

[Alzrius]

I agree with a lot of the other stuff you wrote, but I think this in particular is a bad example. As you rightly observe, the language around "hitting" in combat and individual attacks (especially missile weapons, which always ran contrary to OD&D and AD&D's one minute combat round and its premise that a given round and a single attack roll represented multiple in-fiction attacks), and of healing spells, was always sabotaging Gary's explanation of what hit points actually are. The latter was compatible with characters fighting and moving at full effectiveness no matter how much damage they take (until zero, anyway), but the game rules and language around hitting and damage and hit points always created this cognitive dissonance.

Ben Laurence did a great job articulating a lot of these issues in a blog article a while back.

I might also suggest that hit points are more of a narrativist and gamist concept than they are simulationist. Like saving throws, the essential purpose of hit points is to keep characters alive, because a storybook hero doesn't die to one sword stroke (as a rule). That was the original reason Arneson put them in his game (when a player playing a knight was dissatisfied by being killed in a single round by a troll), and it's still the main reason D&D uses them.

IMO 4E did the best job to date of squaring the circle reconciling hit points to work better and make more sense. Particularly in its linking most healing to the Healing Surge, a value of (usually) 1/4 of a character's max hit points. This meant that we were finally relieved of the issue D&D had always had of "Cure Light Wounds" being capable of restoring a first level character reduced to zero HP unconsciousness (seemingly a serious wound) to full health. And the issue that a low level character or low-HD class like magic user healed more quickly from injury than an experienced character or a combat-trained one who is inured so pain and injury. By making healing proportionate to the character receiving it, 4E made hit points a little less nonsensical.

I think you're right, though, that the overall changes to the hit point system were a bit too much for a substantial percentage of players who had reconciled themselves to the contradictions of D&D's hit point system and didn't want to think about them anymore.

Looking over this, I think that you're outlining a point somewhat (not completely, but somewhat) orthogonal to the issue around hit points trying to model two different things at once.

Now, hit points are very much gamist in function (though I wouldn't say simulationist; while I won't speak to how Ron Edwards used the term, my conception of it has always been about mechanics that set/affect the narrative directly rather than mechanics that happen to abet dramatization), which is why I previously pointed out that they were an area where simulationism backed off. That was, as I posited, a consensus (or maybe I should have called it a compromise) that everyone was unhappy about, but could live with.

But while the issue of scaling wasn't necessarily limited to healing spells being less effective as a character leveled up (that was just the inverse of the aforementioned issue of how the same 8 hit points' worth of damage in one attack could kill a commoner outright, but meant little to a high-level character), 4E's attempt to fix that by having a central healing mechanic that operated on a percentage basis was a legitimately good idea...one that it completely undercut by leaning hard into having hit points (or rather, the loss of hit points) be a model of being progressively injured until your life was in danger and simultaneously being a model of progressively losing combat capability.

While there was a modest amount of conceptual overlap in those two metrics, they were still dissimilar enough that they caused a cognitive gap for a lot of players in how a given solution (i.e. a warlord yelling at someone to let them use a healing surge, a cure light wounds spell, etc.) functioned for both – since, again, it was a single mechanic modeling two different things at the same time – despite being presented as a fix for only one of those two things.

The result was that the percentage-based healing solution was presented as part of a much greater problem. It was like finally fixing that leaky faucet in your bathroom by ripping the entire sink out of the wall. Sure, it no longer leaks, but now you have a big flippin' hole in the wall gushing water everywhere. The solution isn't going to be well-received at that point.

Little things like this came up a lot with regard to attempts to tie abstract presentations to mechanics that lent themselves much easier to singular, well-defined instances of play. For instance, the idea that attack rolls represented a non-specific flow of back-and-forth attacks, feints, parries, etc. over a one-minute course of combat seemed like a nice idea...until someone was using a poisoned weapon. Now, the successful attack roll indicated a very clear, specific hit, since that was the method by which the poison reached your character, and all of a sudden the abstracted nature of attack rolls fell away.

4E had some good ideas, but between poor implementation and being overshadowed by bad ideas, it managed to turn its strengths into weaknesses, and for quite a few people that simply wasn't something that they could forgive.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Would Friends be the same if Phoebe were replaced by Urkel? Would Star Trek be the same if the Federation were replaced by a Roman aristocracy? Would pre-marital sex be the same without a nagging Catholic sense of shame and guilt?
No, I say.
Some things should have their sacred cows. Let other games have the other things to make their own sacred cows out of.

I'm sure dungeon turns, reaction rolls, morale, weapon restrictions by class, level caps by race, race as class, weapon speed, hit point caps by level, separate thief skill systems, and all sorts of other abandoned rules all agree!

The game has changed with each edition/iteration. It can change. Keeping it the same just to appease fans of the old stuff is, in my opinion, a bad design decision.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I'm sure dungeon turns, reaction rolls, morale, weapon restrictions by class, level caps by race, race as class, weapon speed, hit point caps by level, separate thief skill systems, and all sorts of other abandoned rules all agree!

The game has changed with each edition/iteration. It can change. Keeping it the same just to appease fans of the old stuff is, in my opinion, a bad design decision.

Abandoned by the current IP holder, in their current version of the game. Many of those "abandoned" rules are still used in some form by other iterations. WotC 5e is not the whole of the game.

 

[Voadam]

4E's attempt to fix that by having a central healing mechanic that operated on a percentage basis was a legitimately good idea...

Agreed.

one that it completely undercut by leaning hard into having hit points (or rather, the loss of hit points) be a model of being progressively injured until your life was in danger and simultaneously being a model of progressively losing combat capability.

I can not figure out what you are trying to reference here.

4e narrative description about wounds or healing? Healing surges per day? Bloodied condition potentially triggering stuff? Using healing surges for other purposes?

4e is pretty much the same as all other D&D on hp damage, no problems until you hit 0.

The biggest distinction I can think of is that 4e has a limit on being healed by others per day that varies by class.

Non magical warlord inspiration hp healing would be the second biggest.

 

[Alzrius]

Agreed.

I can not figure out what you are trying to reference here.

4e narrative description about wounds or healing? Healing surges per day? Bloodied condition potentially triggering stuff? Using healing surges for other purposes?

4e is pretty much the same as all other D&D on hp damage, no problems until you hit 0.

The biggest distinction I can think of is that 4e has a limit on being healed by others per day that varies by class.

Non magical warlord inspiration hp healing would be the second biggest.

I'm not sure what part you're having trouble figuring out. Previous editions had paid lip service to the idea that non-permanent changes to a character's total hit points (i.e. gaining and losing hit points over the course of an adventure) was about more than just wounds taken/healed, but that was only in vague overviews. Actual mechanics, and presentations thereof, lent themselves almost solely to issues of injures, hence spells being called cure light wounds, regaining hp via bed rest and not plucking four-leaf clovers, etc.

4E, however, tried to walk the walk instead of just talking the talk. A character's hit points changing could be due to injuries received/healed or could be a measure of how close they were getting to a loss of combat capability, hence the use of non-magical "spike" healing in the form of the warlord yelling at you to let you use a healing surge (the most famous example).

I can understand why some people see that as the full flowering of the ideal that earlier editions only aspired to; again, a lot of them put forward the idea that hit points weren't just about wounds. But in marrying those two concepts, 4E made a serious error in trying to have the same mechanic model two different things, causing them to be conflated in a way that a lot of gamers didn't appreciate. There was a reason that previous editions didn't go that far, and I don't think it was a simple lack of innovation.

 

[Lanefan]

D&D has always had the divide of hit points being wounds and hit points being ability to stay combat capable.

In OD&D the difference between a first level fighting man and a 10th level fighting man as ability to stay in combat is there and felt at the table in their hit points during combat. A first level fighting man dies half the time when hit once. A 10th level fighting man gets hit five times and is still swinging his sword for full effect.

Healing a specified fixed amount compared to escalating hp by level was always an awkward match up to higher level characters. In 1e fighters reduced to single digit hp needing more bed rest to heal to full than other classes doing the same was narratively awkward. The least tough characters (magic users, thieves) being able to heal up from wounds faster than tougher characters was awkward.

The answer, of course, is to have natural healing give back a fixed - if small - fraction of one's total hit points per x-amount of time (e.g. 10% per day) such that if everyone starts from 1 h.p. they all rest back up to full in roughly the same amount of time* regardless of their hit point totals. However, the early designers either intentionally chose not to go this route or (my guess) just didn't think of it.

Much later, 4e-5e went ludicrously overboard with this and made the recovery rate 100% per overnight (or long) rest, but they at least got the principle right - even if unintentionally!

* - one could even add in a class-based modifier where the fraction-recovered is greater for tough warriors and lesser for spindly mage types.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Abandoned by the current IP holder, in their current version of the game. Many of those "abandoned" rules are still used in some form by other iterations. WotC 5e is not the whole of the game.

Plenty were abandoned for one or more versions of D&D under TSR. It’s not a new phenomenon, not is it limited to WotC/Hasbro.

 

[Lanefan]

I'm sure dungeon turns, reaction rolls, morale, weapon restrictions by class, level caps by race, race as class, weapon speed, hit point caps by level, separate thief skill systems, and all sorts of other abandoned rules all agree!

The game has changed with each edition/iteration. It can change. Keeping it the same just to appease fans of the old stuff is, in my opinion, a bad design decision.

You're assuming (IMO wrongly) that the abandonment of those various rules was consistently a development for the better.

In some cases it was. Some of those rules don't make sense, or don't work, or don't add enough to proceedings to justify their use.

But in some cases - reaction rolls and morale being two that leap out - their abandonment was a clear step backward. And separate thief skills are exactly the sort of thing I prefer in game design: bespoke mechanics or subsystems for different specific purposes rather than everything shoehorned into a unified mechanic that much of the time doesn't do as good a job as would a bespoke subsystem.

 

[Imaro]

I'm sure dungeon turns, reaction rolls, morale, weapon restrictions by class, level caps by race, race as class, weapon speed, hit point caps by level, separate thief skill systems, and all sorts of other abandoned rules all agree!

The game has changed with each edition/iteration. It can change. Keeping it the same just to appease fans of the old stuff is, in my opinion, a bad design decision.

So is the game changing or staying the same you seem to be claiming... both??

 

[hawkeyefan]

You're assuming (IMO wrongly) that the abandonment of those various rules was consistently a development for the better.

No, I’m not. All I stated was that those rules have been removed for different editions/versions of the game.

Whether their removal was an improvement or a step back is subjective.

So is the game changing or staying the same you seem to be claiming... both??

Yes. It has neither remained exactly the same nor turned into something entirely different… so it has changed some elements, and left others the same.