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

[pemerton]

I said, "The game tells me that the Warlord's words fill me with greater resolve, potentially allowing me to tap into my energy reserves, so I keep fighting with a renewed sense of vigor." This is indeed what happens with Inspiring Word. As a result of the warlord's inspiring words of courage and determination, the target can spend a healing surge (i.e., the aforementioned "tap into my energy reserves") in order to heal their HP. "Healing" is a keyword in the game representing a power or ability that restores HP.But remember, that HP is not strictly meat in 4e, and that That is your hang-up and not the game's.

This too!

 

[pemerton]

I'm a late 2e baby, but this was not only not obviously absurd, but so normative in media derived from D&D that it took decades of arguing about this on the Internet for me to conceive of this as a problem for some people and not just the norm for fantasy. Killing people with singular sword blows was reserved for pointedly "gritty" works.

In fact I just posted elsewhere about running into an example of the concept in the wild, from a book written before I was born.

I owned and played GrailQuest when they came out. They are silly in themselves (eg the poet vampire). I don't remember the spear trap; but I would not have taken these light-hearted books as canonical for the sort of fantasy that Moldvay describes in his Foreword to Basic D&D.

 

[Imaro]

The only film I know of that represented the stab wounds as @Pedantic described them is The Holy Grail. Which is a comedy. The scene with the Black Knight is meant to be silly, not a model for an action adventure game.

Die Hard...
John Wick 1, 2, 3 & 4
Jason Bourne

 

[Autumnal]

Again, if you have the same operation representing two different things, that's a standard that's doing double-duty. So yes, a double-standard.

Putting on my editor/developer hat, I am fairly sure that “double standard” is not the phrase that fits what bugs you. Double standards are what should be single standard but applied inconsistently: racial differences in criminal sentences, lenient penance for a confessor’s buddies, and the like. You’ve got a semiotic concern, wanting each sign to signify one thing and each thing to have one sign. Or you can skip invoking semiotics and say that it’s about identities and how we define them.

But one-to-several relations are super common in reality. Electromagnetism manifests differently depending on whether the magnet or the electric field is moving, but it is a single force. There are four distinct phases of matter, but water is water regardless of whether it’s plasma, gas, liquid, or solid. There are more than 400 distinct kinds of cells, but the ones in the autonomic nervous system are not more or less you than the ones in your epidermis or your bone marrow.

None of those are double standards. And hp meaning things besides injury isn’t, either. It’s a complex definition, and you’d prefer it be a unitary one, or at least a simple one - four elements instead of the 100+ of the periodic table, four humors instead of the DSM, a round world instead of an oblate spheroid, Newtonian mechanics without the complications of relativity for conditions we don’t live in or deal with, and so on. Discussions of color names get into this all the time. So do medical discussions of overlapping sets of symptoms.

The key thing is that when we’re discussing labels and their targets, particularly imaginary targets, there’s no privileged should-be-presumed-correct stance on single and multiple identities and definitions. There’s utility and enjoyability, and if anyone has a funoscope or utilitometer, they never shared it with me. Just, please, keep in mind, that we don’t have to grant you any kind of moral high ground at the outset.

Like most folks here, I find it vastly simpler and more useful to take the traditional definition of hp as covering multiple things to mean what it is. I’m left never needing to do more than minor label surgery to anything that happens in play, and I like that.

 

[MichaelSomething]

If people want a game where the mechanics reinforced and reflect the world/fiction, why isn't Role Master more popular? Or G.U.R.P.S.?

If verisimilitude is undeserved in D&D, why do those who want it stay?

 

[James Gasik]

I wouldn't even call this a flesh wound.

 

[pemerton]

D&D's weird thing is that you get hit with a sword and don't die. Then you get stabbed by a spike trap, pull yourself up off the spikes, and then get hit by another sword, and then you die.

The issue that always seems to spark this discourse is that tolerance for needing 7 swords chops to die (or really, notice) is presumed to extend to tolerance for a "hit" result not necessarily meaning a sword hit you.

Die Hard...
John Wick 1, 2, 3 & 4
Jason Bourne

Where does Jason Bourne get stabbed seven times by a sword? Or get stabbed by a spike trap and pull himself up off the spikes?

 

[pemerton]

If people want a game where the mechanics reinforced and reflect the world/fiction, why isn't Role Master more popular? Or G.U.R.P.S.?

I infer from this that many people do not want that sort of game.

As I posted upthread,

there seems to be no widespread resurgence of RQ, or RM, or C&S, or other classic simulationist systems.

If verisimilitude is undeserved in D&D, why do those who want it stay?

I'm not sure what you are getting at with this?

 

[Alzrius]

The game is silent on a lot of things. There are a lot of things that I have to figure out. So let's imagine that we establish that hit points loss represent an injury. This just shifts the problem and creates a new front.

No, it doesn't "shift" the problem. It still requires some adjudication in terms of the specifics of what's being represented, but it still establishes what's being represented. That's a far smaller cognitive burden than having to determine if it's an injury or just some sort of depletion of personal stamina, luck, divine protection, etc.

Where does my sword hit my opponent? How deep does the cut go? Is my opponent in pain? If the GM narrates that a monster bites me in the chest, am I walking around with a punctured lung and chest cavity? Would I be limping if the monster had bit me in the leg instead? The game doesn't tell me much about anything regarding what's happening with injuries within the context of the game world, regardless of what HP represents. D&D really is not a game that is interested in these sorts of things.

Which is why I've noted previously that the game is more about heroic fantasy than realism, with characters taking numerous injuries (oftentimes serious) with no corresponding loss of prowess. In that regard, you're free to narrate any particular set of wounds that you want (within reasonable limits, obviously; no one is going to seriously countenance you saying someone's head has been chopped off or their eyes gouged out) without creating any sort of cognitive gap in doing so, unlike the one that you'd get when you suffer burn wounds and then have someone else at the party make them go away (according to the game's operations) by shouting at you to buck you up.

I personally suspect that the reason why the game is silent is not because it off-loads the task of determining within the context of the game world onto the players, but, rather, because it has historically off-loaded this responsibility onto the the Dungeon Master! The DM was the referee, the arbiter, and judge of interpreting the mechanics in the game fiction. The DM was the system. What does the HP loss represent? That's what the DM tells you.

Strictly speaking, I was including the Dungeon Master as one of the players in this context (which is a whole 'nother can of worms), in that someone sitting around the table has to do what the game could (and arguably should) be doing on its own for them. Of course, historically it has done exactly this, at least insofar as determining that the loss of hit points has been injuries taken; as noted before, prior to 4E the game was remarkably consistent in that regard.

It would probably be better if we ignored your last eight words and the smiley here.

More convenient for you, certainly, but not better.

I said, "The game tells me that the Warlord's words fill me with greater resolve, potentially allowing me to tap into my energy reserves, so I keep fighting with a renewed sense of vigor." This is indeed what happens with Inspiring Word.

And it "helps them heal."

As a result of the warlord's inspiring words of courage and determination, the target can spend a healing surge (i.e., the aforementioned "tap into my energy reserves") in order to heal their HP. "Healing" is a keyword in the game representing a power or ability that restores HP.But remember, that HP is not strictly meat in 4e, and that That is your hang-up and not the game's.

No, it's the game's hang-up, too. That's fairly self-evident from the fact that the mechanical operation is exactly the same as the cleric's healing word (4E PHB p. 62), in that they use positive energy to let the target spend one of their own healing surges, while the text describes it as "You whisper a brief prayer as divine light washes over your target, helping to mend its wounds." Given that it wants to have the same thing be two different things (i.e. "recover resiliency" and "mend wounds"), that creates an issue with what the keyword is denoting, since it can vary by context, and so that context has to be parsed by the players (including the DM) more than they would if it was only connoting one thing.

This assertion is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

More like a self-evident truth. Having one mechanic present potentially two different things depending on the circumstance is more complex than if one mechanic presented itself as only one thing, period. That's not really something that can be argued. You might say that's not a big deal, and it might not be for you, but it's undeniably more complicated (and doesn't need to be).

Based on what he said prior, I imagine that @Hussar reading this would probably think to himself "what cognitive gap?" That's probably true for others in this thread.

Which is why I've taken the trouble to explain it.

I wouldn't call it a cognitive gap. I would call it a simple case of vagueness.

That's a semantic distinction, and not really helpful in what it offers. If something is vague, then you have to expend mental energy figuring it out. It's a gap that your cognition bridges. Changing the shorthand doesn't change that.

You don't like that the game is vague about this subject matter. You want the game to be more explicit and less vague about what's happening with HP. It's not, and the game and its designer don't want to be explicit about these things or they are possibly uninterested in such things. There may be reasons why that's the case. It's possible that they see value in keeping HP vague. It's possible that making HP less vague makes other and more problems than it's worth.

Except the game used to get alone just fine doing exactly what I've been talking about. Remember, 4E changed things up by actually having that idea of "Hit point loss/restoration isn't just injury" actually be present in the game's mechanical operations. Prior to that, the idea received lip service in essays, but wasn't ever actually suggested in how the mechanics functioned. Then a change was made, and while that might have addressed certain issues, it also presented new ones, which to my mind were much greater than anything it fixed.

4e is probably the one of two editions of D&D that goes to the greatest lengths to do the metaphorical heavy lifting on your behalf through its extensive use of keywords, terms, and so on that it provides, particularly in regards to its character abilities and powers.

No, I disagree strongly, in that 4E took its gamist aspects much further than any edition before or since, and so abandoned much of the heavy lifting with regard to conveying what the various operations were actually representing from an in-game standpoint. As you yourself noted, it's vague.

You mean like HP and healing surges? While not perfectly tuned, 4e is a remarkably consistent game when you look into how its design.

From a gamist standpoint; not in terms of actually connecting meta-game operations to in-character happenings.

But do they though? Do I have have to deal with this problem? Does @Hussar, @pemerton, @Red Castle, or others have to deal with this at our tables? If this is a problem, I have never seen it play out at any table I have personally sat it. If it is a problem, then it is only one that I have encountered on message boards.

You don't "have" to deal with the problem, in the sense that you can just ignore the issue. Or simply bridge the cognitive gap on your own. In that regard, it's much like any other issue, in that you don't have to fix a broken stair when you can just step over it, or you might think that fixing the stair isn't a very hard job to do, and can be accomplished with ease. But I'd say it's still better for the stair not to be broken in the first place.

If you are curious for the answers to your questions, then I would encourage you to read the rules of 4e. You know how, for example, a fireball causes fire damage on a successful save? You can read it in the Fireball spell description. Likewise, these powers in 4e will often explicitly tell you what kind of damage and/or effect the target takes on a miss.

I'd like to encourage you to read the rules as well, so that you can have a better appreciation for things like how the framing fiction for inspiring word says it restores the same hit points that a fireball causes, despite the fact that one is causing fire damage and the other is reinvigorating you, making the players (including the DM) be the ones who have to track which thing the hit point changes are representing (i.e. injury or stamina) when mapping the game-play to what's happening in the setting.

That is the 4e explanation for how a miss is still a hit: i.e., splash effects (just like partial damage on saves), glancing blows (weapon attack powers!), or incidental effects of the attack. Now granted, you may personally want a more thorough explanation or have it done on a case by case basis, but the game does indicate what a miss is intended to represent.

You need to go back over what's been said in this thread, since this issue (i.e the problems with damage on a miss) has already been raised and dealt with before. But to reiterate, the problem is that the game indicates that the same operation can represent multiple different things, creating a cognitive gap where the players (including the DM) have to then figure out how to connect the two. If your character is badly burned, and had a warlord yell at them, then there's an issue with figuring out how they keep taking wounds and not being healed, but rather motivated to stay active even when the "wound hp" damage they've taken exceeds their total hp, but the numbers are still in positive amounts thanks to "resilience hp"-type healing.

It does inform us what is going on in the setting.

Not as well as it could, and did before.

A lot of the abilities are pretty clear about what's going on in the setting, including what happens on a miss. In fact, it's arguably even clearer than other editions of D&D. Like when I "miss" as a Cleric with my Turn Undead ability, the game tells me that targets take half radiant damage but aren't pushed or immobilized on a miss.

It's actually less clear than in other editions; all of them, in fact. That's because the gamist applications that 4E champions simply don't prioritize the connecting of the mechanics with in-game representation. If they did, we wouldn't have Schrodinger's hit points, where they can be injury one round and then personal stamina the next.

 

[Alzrius]

Putting on my editor/developer hat, I am fairly sure that “double standard” is not the phrase that fits what bugs you. Double standards are what should be single standard but applied inconsistently: racial differences in criminal sentences, lenient penance for a confessor’s buddies, and the like. You’ve got a semiotic concern, wanting each sign to signify one thing and each thing to have one sign. Or you can skip invoking semiotics and say that it’s about identities and how we define them.

The semantics bother me less than the underlying issue, in that the problem is that we have a single operation (i.e. hit point loss/restoration) being defined as two different things from an in-character perspective, in a way that makes it harder to model what's going on in the game world. As you noted, it's a semiotic problem, so what we call it is less important than the fact that we can all recognize it and discuss it; as it is right now, there's a vocal minority who keep insisting that it's not even real!

But one-to-several relations are super common in reality.

D&D is not a reality simulator, and never has been, so this isn't a super helpful observation. If we can all agree that 4E's hit point loss/restoration mechanics have more than one in-game presentation, and that it would be easier to figure out what it's representing in the game world if it just had one, that's where we should start from.

None of those are double standards. And hp meaning things besides injury isn’t, either.

Again, the nomenclature is a digression more than anything. Attaching multiple in-game representations to the same mechanic not only requires the players to keep track of which one is being used at a given time (and how they interact in trying to map out the course of play over time), but doesn't have to be that way, as we've seen in previous editions.

The key thing is that when we’re discussing labels and their targets, particularly imaginary targets, there’s no privileged should-be-presumed-correct stance on single and multiple identities and definitions. There’s utility and enjoyability, and if anyone has a funoscope or utilitometer, they never shared it with me. Just, please, keep in mind, that we don’t have to grant you any kind of moral high ground at the outset.

The fact that you think I'm claiming any sort of moral high ground suggests that you're not reading what I'm saying, so much as reading into it. At this point, I'm more interested in being able to call a spade a spade, in that having one meta-mechanic be two different in-game things is more complicated than having it be one in-game thing. But even that seems to be a bridge too far for most people, many of whom keep trying to make it into a moral argument for reasons beyond my understanding.

Like most folks here, I find it vastly simpler and more useful to take the traditional definition of hp as covering multiple things to mean what it is. I’m left never needing to do more than minor label surgery to anything that happens in play, and I like that.

That's the traditional stated definition, but not how the game actually employed the operation, take note. If you find that easier to parse, then good for you, but make note that it's still something that has to be parsed on your end, and that you wouldn't need to do so if hit point loss/restoration only represented one thing.