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

[Snarf Zagyg]

You can argue (and have) that the absence of "damage on a miss" means 5E has a lower number of absolute instances of this dissonance/ambiguity, but I think that's straining at gnats while swallowing camels.

I've actually been planning to do a longer post on this subject for a while, but I need to complete my Iron DM entry at some point.

So instead, I'll just briefly say that arguing what must work, and what cannot work, for someone else when it comes to suspension of disbelief is never a winning card to play. At all.

To put it in the simplest terms, you can't go to a Star Wars fan and say, "Look, the ships go 'pew pew pew' in space. Because of that, you have to accept every other thing. Because there are no sounds in space."

You're welcome to do that, but ... good luck with that. People can (and will) accept different things, in different contexts, for different reasons. But telling people that they must accept everything because they are willing to suspend disbelief over one thing should never be acceptable.

 

[Zardnaar]

I think the main problem is online we get sidetracked into nitpicking over what hit points are.

Simpler explanation people just don't like it. If tgey don't like it they won't buy your product.
Doesn't matter to WotC who's right or wrong.

People have tried to obfuscate the unpopularity of 4Eisms. Damage on a miss is gone burger. I don't think it's a deal breaker itself other 4Eisms made it into 5E. They like 5E s accept it, don't like 4E don't accept it.

It's basically that simple. It's not the mechanics as such that's the problem. It's the playstyle those mechanics are tied to that people hated.

WotC cares about sales.

 

[Mannahnin]

You're welcome to do that, but ... good luck with that. People can (and will) accept different things, in different contexts, for different reasons.

Absolutely. I've explicitly acknowledged that repeatedly in this discussion and others.

But telling people that they must accept everything because they are willing to suspend disbelief over one thing should never be acceptable.

I offered an opinion. I didn't tell anyone what they must do.

 

[tomBitonti]

This is a good point and a good question.

Maybe the high publishing rate was "unsustainable" for a larger audience than PF has. Maybe the more hardcore fans who go with something like Pathfinder over "mainstream"/official D&D are more likely to have the enthusiasm and willingness to spend which are necessary to keep up.

Folks also raised the issue that jumping onto Paizo's train of books after 3rd and 3.5 was more palatable because they were more directly compatible. Whereas starting over with 4E felt more onerous because it meant in at least some psychological sense like walking away from the investment I already made in 3.x books.

Part of the Pathfinder schedule is a subscription service of modules and adventure path volumes. That neatly fills the void left when Dungeon went out of print. (Don't get me started whining about the online Dungeon replacement!). I am a long time Pathfinder subscriber.

How does Pathfinder compare if the adventure path and module subscriptions are remove? Or are we already only counting hardcovers?

TomB

 

[Mannahnin]

No, see, this is where you lose me. I've heard (many, many times over) that hit point loss isn't/can't be/shouldn't be physical damage because there's no associated loss of combat prowess. This argument has never struck me as sound, because it presumes that if X is absent, Y must be as well, because it's concomitant.

The problem is that this relies on a realism argument that D&D has never been party to. D&D is not a reality simulator, and hasn't ever tried to be. It's presentation of combat, including the wounds taken therein, is more in line with myths and legends, pulp fiction, and action shows/movies. Even in the low(er)-fantasy iterations of the game, your character was much more John Rambo than John Average, able to take severe wounds and keep going until they finished their mission, at which point they might need to spend some time in a hospital, but would still be fine after a few weeks.

...

I've said many times that hit points are an area of unhappy consensus, where verisimilitude is set aside in favor of playability. Saying that hit point loss/recovery can't be the case because it lacks verisimilitude ignores that, and in so doing doesn't (to my mind) accurately examine D&D as it is.

I think we're 90% on the same page here, but as Snarf observed, different people have different subjective boundaries about what strains our disbelief and represents "a bridge too far".

I agree with you completely that D&D is much more a simulator of heroic fantasy fiction and action movies, as I talked about earlier. And within that context, the continual acceleration of healing over editions and the introduction of abilities which restore hit points which could not plausibly be healing actual injuries makes sense. Whether that's Second Wind (4E or 5E versions), a 4E Warlord's Inspiring Word, or arguably the ability to self-heal a Monk gets at 7th level in 1E.

And really, you can see this if you take the "there's rarely serious injury, except when someone's killed, because realism is otherwise absent" argument to its logical extension. When someone is dealt a serious blow under the fiction (such as, again, if they're hit with a poisoned weapon, since that has to be a hit in order for the poison to be delivered), the game has no real modeling for permanent injuries that never (magic notwithstanding) heal. So because there's no way to model irreparable head trauma, perforated organs that never function at full capacity, nerve damage, etc. are we then to say that the game has no serious injuries at all, anywhere?

I don't think this bit is responsive to the discussion.

 

[Alzrius]

I think we're 90% on the same page here, but as Snarf observed, different people have different subjective boundaries about what strains our disbelief and represents "a bridge too far".

It's the nature of fandoms to balkanize (oftentimes belligerently so) over minor points of interpretation, I suppose. Religions too, for that matter.

I agree with you completely that D&D is much more a simulator of heroic fantasy fiction and action movies, as I talked about earlier in the thread. And within that context, the continual acceleration of healing and the introduction of abilities which restore hit points which could not plausibly be healing actual injuries makes sense. Whether that's Second Wind (4E or 5E versions) or arguably the ability to self-heal a Monk gets at 7th level in 1E.

Insofar as the monk goes, that struck me as them essentially super-charging their body's natural ability to heal itself, i.e. the natural opposite of them slowing their bodily processes down to the point where they can feign being dead, which (it's no coincidence) they can do as of 6th level, right before they learn the self-healing trick.

That said, I agree that the acceleration of healing and "spike" recovery of hit points via non-magical (or other supernatural/mystical/fantastic abilities a la the monk) means is problematic with the injury/healing presentation of hit point loss/recovery. That's kind of the issue I've been talking about, since it makes hit points be two different things at once. It'd be less of an issue if they made a separate mechanic for that (e.g. the old wound/vitality split in d20 Star Wars and 3.5 Unearthed Arcana), but no one seems to want that.

I don't think this bit is responsive to the discussion.

It was an extension of the "it can't be injury, because there's no loss of combat ability" argument (a reductio ad absurdum, I suppose?), showing how why it doesn't (to me) hold up if you follow it through to that level of examination. In other words, that just because the attendant complications aren't there, doesn't mean the base operation is absent.

 

[Thomas Shey]

As Thomas and others pointed out, the rules for ammunition (missile weapons take a defined and specific number of actual shots in OD&D and AD&D, unlike melee weapons which allegedly work more abstractly) and poison (if an envenomed blade "hits" and that means there's a possibility of blood contact, there must have been a concrete hit, right?) have always run afoul of the 1 minute abstract combat round.

I always thought the best way to think of level-elevating hit points if you were going to go with that model was that what was actually going on was that it wasn't that your hits were actually going up as you advanced; it was that your defensive skills meant that hits were doing less and less damage over time; in other words, what your level was doing was effectively dividing damage; its just that its easier on a bookkeeping level its easier to do it that way.

Of course that requires you to not have healing being a fixed value, whether magical, technological (which I use broadly to include things like medical care) or natural, but a value that also goes up with your level; so if you really want a Heal Minor Wounds spell you have it do something like 1 point times the target's level.

Exactly. I carried a Swiss army knife for years. Victorinox makes a lot of good multi-tools. A multi-tool will get you by fine in a lot of situations and if I need a screwdriver it's always going to be more useful to me than a chef's knife.

But when I want to cook a meal, I'm always going to want a chef's knife over a Swiss army knife. It's not an apples to apples comparison of the multi-tool or the specialized tool universally being better.

There's also another question in play: is what you're selling really as broadly useful as you think, or it it just that a big market exists for it? A lot of people buy wrenches, but I don't want to be using one to pound a nail just because I'm used to it, and I'm not sold some people in the hobby don't seem to think that's a virtue when it comes to game systems.

 

[Mannahnin]

Insofar as the monk goes, that struck me as them essentially super-charging their body's natural ability to heal itself, i.e. the natural opposite of them slowing their bodily processes down to the point where they can feign being dead, which (it's no coincidence) they can do as of 6th level, right before they learn the self-healing trick.

Also a valid mental model.

That said, I agree that the acceleration of healing and "spike" recovery of hit points via non-magical (or other supernatural/mystical/fantastic abilities a la the monk) is problematic with the injury/healing presentation of hit point loss/recovery. That's kind of the issue I've been talking about, since it makes hit points be two different things at once. It'd be less of an issue if they made a separate mechanic for that (e.g. the old wound/vitality split in d20 Star Wars and 3.5 Unearthed Arcana), but no one seems to want that.

Yeah, I think nearly all D&D players are ok with the fact that HP represent different things at different times. They just have varying degrees of tolerance for the ways that's expressed.

It was an extension of the "it can't be injury, because there's no loss of combat ability" argument (a reductio ad absurdum, I suppose?), showing how why it doesn't (to me) hold up if you follow it through to that level of examination. In other words, that just because the attendant complications aren't there, doesn't mean the base operation is absent.

I think that a game can choose to simulate one without simulating the other, judging one to be farther outside its remit/focus.

 

[Pedantic]

I always thought the best way to think of level-elevating hit points if you were going to go with that model was that what was actually going on was that it wasn't that your hits were actually going up as you advanced; it was that your defensive skills meant that hits were doing less and less damage over time; in other words, what your level was doing was effectively dividing damage; its just that its easier on a bookkeeping level its easier to do it that way.

I always feel like the stupid, simple interpretation gets short shrift in these discussions. I've just vaccilated between describing hits as proportionate to their impact on a character's total HP, "the kobold gets a graze in against your side" vs "the kobold stabs you in the thigh" and just accepting higher level fighters get stabbed 12 times before they care, as the situation calls for.

We talk a lot about wound penalties and modeling actual damage and all that, but I think "weapons don't kill strong people in one hit" mostly just fades into the background as a weird setting norm. In many ways, D&D and other media derived from its conventions have started to change the norms of fantasy presentation in general to lower weapon lethality, especially toward protagonists.

 

[darjr]

A little while ago, someone mentioned in a different thread that the 3.5 release schedule was "unsustainable." I tried to point out that we had evidence to the contrary, since Paizo kept up a similar (if not even more aggressive) release schedule of 3.5 (for two years) and PF1 (for ten years) products, which hasn't slowed down much (if at all) since they went to PF2 and Starfinder. Hence, it quite clearly is sustainable to print so many products so fast, even if you have to adjust how you're releasing them (i.e. have a subscription option) and what your target sales are (i.e. if you need to be making nine figures' worth of sales per year).

But for some reason, there was major pushback on that idea, and I'm still not clear why.

Unsustainable for WotC. Like how 4e sales were unsustainable for WotC even though for most of it they were selling more than Paizo.

And even they had to turn the crank on the new edition treadmill.