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

[Parmandur]

But save for half damage is perfectly fine, right?

It's not on a hit.

 

[James Gasik]

D&D has a long tradition of using hit points as more than just "hits to kill" however. For example, the Wilderness Survival Guide tells me that I'm at risk of taking a point of damage every 3 turns for having the nerve to walk around in 85 degree weather!

 

[James Gasik]

It's not on a hit.

There have totally been spells that require an attack roll and then allowed a save for reduced damage. I don't see how one is perfectly fine and the other is somehow ridiculous.

EDIT: I suppose you're right, that's not precisely the same thing. But we do have instances in 5e of effects that still deal damage if you miss. For example, let's look at Lightning Arrow.

 

[Parmandur]

D&D has a long tradition of using hit points as more than just "hits to kill" however. For example, the Wilderness Survival Guide tells me that I'm at risk of taking a point of damage every 3 turns for having the nerve to walk around in 85 degree weather!
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To be fair, that does actually work under a strict "HP as meat" read of the rules.

 

[James Gasik]

To be fair, that does actually work under a strict "HP as meat" read of the rules.

Except the book was printed in the same edition where the DMG tells us HP are not meat, lol. Either way, the nature of hit points has been a grey area for a long time and I don't really see how 4e was somehow worse than most other editions in this regard.

Or put another way, it's like saying everything since the original D&D has been all downhill, lol.

 

[pemerton]

just because the injured high-level character in AD&D recovers faster from his wounds than someone in the real world would doesn't mean that he's not recovering from his wounds (remember, verisimilitude isn't realism). The actual operation doesn't change, even if the rate at which it operates is tweaked to be more like an action tale than a reality-simulator.

Verisimilitude means the property of seeming true or real.

Your interpretation of AD&D hp does not seem very verisimilitudinous to me; nor to Gygax, I assume, hence his account of hp which is different from yours.

 

[Lanefan]

So it takes the same amount of rest to get over the (psychosomatically-induced?) pain of imagining myself having fallen into an (illusory) pit as it does to recover from the breaks, sprains and bruises of falling into the real thing?

Have you never had one of those headaches that hangs on for a few days? That psionic (or illusion-caused) pain could very easily map to such a thing, only brought on by a different cause.

And the Cleric's packing a whole bag of Aspirin!

 

[Lanefan]

Hit dice used by just resting for a bit, or all HP coming back after a good 8 hours of sleep, suggests that it is not exactly meat.

All hit points coming back after a good 8 hours sleep - even if you were at death's door a few times during the previous day - makes no sense. It takes the gamist abstraction that we all kinda have to accept and dials it up to eleven.

Some small fraction of your hit points coming back over that same 8 hours rest does make sense; 1e's natural rest rate of 1 point a day went too far the other way (and, in the process, treated all hit points as meat for purposes of natural recovery time). And it should be a set fraction such that everyone, regardless of their total hit points, takes roughly the same amount of time to recover (though I could very easily see putting a species-based modifier on that, using the rationale that some species simply heal up/regenerate a bit faster than others).

 

[Lanefan]

Alas, even today, "pain" is not something cure spells does anything about. In fact, looking back at the game's history, I don't know that pain has ever been a thing healing magic does anything about.

Not familiar with either of those spells; but were it me writing them those spells would pack some damage with them.

 

[Lanefan]

But save for half damage is perfectly fine, right?

Whenever save-for-half comes into play, it almost always means you've been caught in a big enough area of some damaging effect that you couldn't escape it entirely.

I've always seen save-for-half as, in part, a convenient shortcut to take the place of rolling up the damage separately for each being in the area, which would be more realistic but would also sometimes involve a LOT of dice-rolling!

The one that sticks in my simulationist craw a little is 'evasion', where someone (usually a Monk) in the area takes no damage at all on a save.