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

[Thomas Shey]

Accessibility. The answer is always accessibility.

I think its easy for you to underestimate how many people don't care about simulationist concerns at all. If they cared that much, there'd be more in other places, accessibility or no. You can argue there's a middle ground, but that's by nature just an assumption.

 

[pemerton]

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.

<snip>

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.

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.

I argue it. I've played countless hours of 4e D&D, and even more countless hours of Rolemaster. Damage dealing, and recovery, are more complex in RM than in 4e D&D. This is despite the fact that, in RM, none of the healing mechanics represent multiple different things.

And I certainly don't find interpreting all hit point loss as physical injury simple at all, because it produces absurdities in the fiction that then muck everything up. Whereas, playing 4e, understanding hp recovery via the use of effects such as Healing Word, Inspiring Word, Word of Vigour, Lay on Hands and the like never caused problems at my table.

A character who is set back by fireball - by the heat, perhaps the burns, etc - recovers their resilience when a Warlord speaks an Inspiring Word, or when a paladin gives of their own being via a Lay on Hands. Nothing obliges us to imagine that any burns are gone. But they no longer set the character back. In film, my conception of this is the dream sequence in The Two Towers, in which Aragorn is brought back to life by the licking of his loyal horse. This does not cure whatever injuries he sustained falling over the cliff. But it does restore his resolve, enabling him to go on. 4e D&D, in this respect at least, has a highly sentimental orientation - its whole system for recovery rests on the premise that any setback can be recovered from if a character has sufficient conviction and support from allies. It has more in common, in this respect, with LotR than (say) The Maltese Falcon.

Also, just FYI, the notion of "positive energy" isn't part of 4e D&D. It does have a notion of radiant damage, but the Healing Word prayer does not have the radiant keyword.

 

[pemerton]

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.

Consider the scenario that I outlined a few posts prior: if you have "injury hp" and "resilience hp" as one mechanic, then what happens if your "injury hp" eventually exceeds your total hit points, but the actual number never drops to 0 because you've been given "resilience hp" healing over the course of a session.

To put that another way, if you have 30 hit points, and take 20 hit points of fireball damage, you're now at 10 hp. If you then get healing worded for 20 hit points, you're now back to full. Now if you take another 20 hit points of sword damage from some orcs later that same session, you've taken a total of 40 "injury hp" damage, but are still at 10 hp altogether thanks to that "resilience healing." According to the game rules, you're still alive, even though you've taken more "injury hp" than you have total hit points, with only "resilience hp" making up the difference. How is that?

4e does not draw any distinction of the sort you are making up here, and so the issue does not arise in 4e play. If your character is not dead, then they are not "so badly burned" that they cannot keep going by virtue of their heroic resolve and the urgings of their companions.

Am I forgetting anything you’d need to differently depending on which kind of strain a particular hp loss represents? I can’t think of any, but truly, I have good reason not to trust such self-assessments.

No you're not forgetting anything.

 

[pemerton]

I'm pretty sure that one being an AoE elemental attack and one being a weapon attack means that they are different in terms of what's being said to happen in the in-game presentation. In one, the "miss" is a literal miss, and yet is still dealing damage somehow, while the other is covering an area which means that there isn't "miss" per se because it's literally affecting the entirety of the character's space and the spaces around them. In other words, one has the attack being explicitly something you can't avoid (without an exception-based ability) while the other doesn't.

You are making up assumptions that are not part of the game.

@Aldarc and I already quoted the rules text upthread, from the 4e PHB, that tells us what a miss means. It doesn't mean what you say here.

And there is no assumption, in the game, that a fireball is literally affecting the entirety of a character's space such they they can't avoid it. In fact the game presents, and treats, both the weapon attack and the elemental AoE as identical except that the AoE can affect more targets.

When the game is played in accordance with its rule, it does not present contradictions or incoherence. What it does present, as I already posted just upthread, is a world in which heroes, even those who are severely set back by the physical or mental attacks of their opponents, are able to press on and recover from that setback provided they have sufficient inner resolve and the support of their allies.

This fiction may be too sentimental for some tastes, but it is not incoherent.

 

[pemerton]

Spells named "cure light wounds

That can heal severe wounds? (On low level characters.)

non-magical healing that could only be done by bed rest

Sleeping one's arm back on, one's bones back together, and one's viscera back into place?

 

[Micah Sweet]

I think its easy for you to underestimate how many people don't care about simulationist concerns at all. If they cared that much, there'd be more in other places, accessibility or no. You can argue there's a middle ground, but that's by nature just an assumption.

If they didn't care at all, they'd be playing something else, except for accessibility.

 

[Micah Sweet]

You are making up assumptions that are not part of the game.

@Aldarc and I already quoted the rules text upthread, from the 4e PHB, that tells us what a miss means. It doesn't mean what you say here.

And there is no assumption, in the game, that a fireball is literally affecting the entirety of a character's space such they they can't avoid it. In fact the game presents, and treats, both the weapon attack and the elemental AoE as identical except that the AoE can affect more targets.

When the game is played in accordance with its rule, it does not present contradictions or incoherence. What it does present, as I already posted just upthread, is a world in which heroes, even those who are severely set back by the physical or mental attacks of their opponents, are able to press on and recover from that setback provided they have sufficient inner resolve and the support of their allies.

This fiction may be too sentimental for some tastes, but it is not incoherent.

Agreed. It is not incoherent, and it is too sentimental for my tastes.

 

[Kannik]

At the risk of hitting this equine so hard it turns into a death knightmare…

I find the “Gary was lying” angle an… an interesting tack to take. Especially since he chose to iterate it not just once but separately in both books, with further allusions to it other sections dealing with damage, all illustrating what, to him and the game, HP represented.

When it comes to “Cure Light Wounds,” I would submit that it simply sounded more evocative than a spell called “Add back a Few Hit Points.” Especially given that Gygaxian writing and flavour is one of the things that is often lauded as the beauty of the earlier editions. And, perhaps, with him being so close to the work and fully knowing what HP were and what he was going for, he also didn’t see it as a disconnect to have the word wounds in there for something that wasn’t strictly wounds.

I’d also say it’s good to remember other quotes from the DMG:

It is important to keep in mind that, after all is said and done, ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS is a game. Because it is a game, certain things which seem "unrealistic" or simply unnecessary are integral to the system.

Gary designed things to craft what he thought would make for an interesting game experience. Healing was slow in 1e/2e without magic because that’s the game type Gary preferred (and/or was used to). Gary seemed to want to have magic be extra impactful (including from magic items) and to have resource management be important (perhaps from his background in wargaming -- number of torches could be a thing in the game too back then, such as in tournament modules).

Now, is there a problem that certain people envisioned (and can only envision) HP as being/needs to be meat-related? I don’t think it is – there’s so many oddities in the D&D structures that letting someone’s meat be more punishable as they level up might not feel all that weird. Or simply being that it’s just part of how the game runs, so, let’s run with it. Or if introduced to the game without reading the book(s) cover to cover, a meat-based concept might be the first place they land on.

However, I assert that’s never been a universal view or capital T truth. Just anecdotally (FWIW), in the 15 years or so of playing 1e and then 2e, none of the players I played with, across different groups and different countries, had issue with seeing and accepting HP as being related to various things that fed into a meta-game thing, rather than needing to strictly, only, account for physical meat effects. They envisioned and could imagine HP in its Gygaxian broad sense. (Same occurred in my 3e groups.)

4e did indeed take full advantage of what HP was in its design in a way that previous editions hadn’t yet done. But it didn’t redefine it or invent anything new for HP. Was it unfamiliar when compared to the internalized (yet very familiar) dissonances already present in the game? Might it elicit more examination in more situations? Sure. And for some that might have been more than they could bear. Fair enough! Some might also simply have wanted slower recovery (I myself wrote a supplement on drivethrurpg to that end). Also fair! But, once again, that is separate from whether the nature of HP itself changed in 4e.

 

[pemerton]

At the risk of hitting this equine so hard it turns into a death knightmare…

I find the “Gary was lying” angle an… an interesting tack to take. Especially since he chose to iterate it not just once but separately in both books, with further allusions to it other sections dealing with damage, all illustrating what, to him and the game, HP represented.

When it comes to “Cure Light Wounds,” I would submit that it simply sounded more evocative than a spell called “Add back a Few Hit Points.” Especially given that Gygaxian writing and flavour is one of the things that is often lauded as the beauty of the earlier editions. And, perhaps, with him being so close to the work and fully knowing what HP were and what he was going for, he also didn’t see it as a disconnect to have the word wounds in there for something that wasn’t strictly wounds.

This all sounds plausible. I think it's fair to conjecture, too, that the question What, in the fiction, does hp loss correspond too? had become more pressing by the late 70s (when the PHB and DMG were written), as the basic structure of the game had become relatively familiar and bedded down, and the more imaginative elements were being seen by more players - especially less wargame-y players - as the reason for picking up this intriguing new game form.

Gary designed things to craft what he thought would make for an interesting game experience. Healing was slow in 1e/2e without magic because that’s the game type Gary preferred (and/or was used to). Gary seemed to want to have magic be extra impactful (including from magic items) and to have resource management be important (perhaps from his background in wargaming -- number of torches could be a thing in the game too back then, such as in tournament modules).

As I think I may have already posted upthread, I see a relatively tight connection here to Gygax's discussion of time in his DMG. Clearly the passage of in-game time, and its correlation to real world time, and the resulting implications for which PCs belonging to which players were available for a foray into the dungeon in this evening's session, was an important thing for Gygax even though it's not really a thing (as best I can tell) at the overwhelming majority of contemporary D&D tables.

In that context, having a PC not available for today's session because they are laid up in bed, resting, is an interesting part of the game dynamic.

 

[James Gasik]

This all sounds plausible. I think it's fair to conjecture, too, that the question What, in the fiction, does hp loss correspond too? had become more pressing by the late 70s (when the PHB and DMG were written), as the basic structure of the game had become relatively familiar and bedded down, and the more imaginative elements were being seen by more players - especially less wargame-y players - as the reason for picking up this intriguing new game form.

As I think I may have already posted upthread, I see a relatively tight connection here to Gygax's discussion of time in his DMG. Clearly the passage of in-game time, and its correlation to real world time, and the resulting implications for which PCs belonging to which players were available for a foray into the dungeon in this evening's session, was an important thing for Gygax even though it's not really a thing (as best I can tell) at the overwhelming majority of contemporary D&D tables.

In that context, having a PC not available for today's session because they are laid up in bed, resting, is an interesting part of the game dynamic.

Underlying all of this is the changes over the decades to how quickly PC's can recover from adventuring. In the very beginning, healing magic was sharply limited past Cure Light Wounds, and it could take weeks to heal without their powers. (EDIT NECESSARY DUE TO OLD MAN BRAIN)

3e created a paradigm where it became increasingly easy to not need natural healing, and to have characters are full hit points for most encounters. 4e continued to make healing easier, but put an absolute limit on how many times a character could heal in a day. 5e has easy healing and no real cap- a Fighter with Second Wind can practically regenerate by kicking back for a day and using Second Wind every hour.

Indeed, Crawford had this to say about monster design. From this, we know that using the encounter building rules simply tell you when they expect the party to be out of resources for the day, but no individual encounter is built with the idea that the party is at 75%, 65%, or 50%- they all assume 100% resources. Characters are likely presumed to mostly be at high levels of hit points.

How does this relate to the nature of hit points? Largely because, just by resting for an hour, you can spend some hit dice to reverse any sort of injury, be it from being hacked apart by the claws of a troll or flash fried by a lightning bolt. No injury is permanent, even in the face of "natural" healing. This has (at least) two possible implications-

One, that hit points can't be meat, because wounds simply do not heal that way!

Or, alternately, hit dice are a nigh-supernatural resource that allows those with them to recover at fantastic rates (going all the way back to Recovery Tests from FASA's Earthdawn).

My suggestion? Relax and play D&D. Don't worry about verisimilitude or the man behind the curtain. Some aspects of the game just can't make any sense, if they ever did.

"If you're wondering how he eats and breathes
And other science facts
Then repeat to yourself 'It's just a show,
I should really just relax.'"