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

[Alzrius]

I think Hussar had a solid point that there's a language/worldview issue here interfering with mutual comprehension.

Possibly, though I'd like to think there's at least some level of understanding here, even if there is disagreement.

It's not an essay, though I suppose this is a fairly trivial point. It's several paragraphs in each book explaining what hit points are to players and DMs.

The entire damage system bears out Gary's explanation. There being no wound penalties. No hit locations (he talks about that in the DMG too). The massive multiplication of ability to take hits with increasing level. Hit points are and always have been an abstraction of the character's ability to avoid defeat. To minimize or avoid harm and to be worn down gradually over time until they are actually at risk of an injurious blow laying them low.

It is completely fair and reasonable for you to point at the rules for hit point recovery and say "this looks like physical recovery from injury over time", but that's not all it is. As Gary explains, it's also rest permitting the recovery of "metaphysical" factors, along with physical ones, like exhaustion and any minor wounds.

And examples exist across editions of recovery being not purely physical. Song of Rest, Second Wind, and the use of Hit Dice during a 1 hour rest and bringing yourself to full HP are all common and core examples in 5E. The nature of any injuries which are a component of HP loss is necessarily minor and ignorable. And HP restoration is in practice often some factor, magical OR non, allowing the character to ignore scratches, burns, bruises, fatigue, psychic strain, or whatever for mechanical purposes. We can envision them recovering from and healing any (minor) actual physical harm gradually over downtime at whatever pace best suits our suspension of disbelief and our vision of the world.

Nomenclature of Gary's explanation aside, and also leaving aside that the lack of wound penalties is an appeal to realism that isn't indicative of anything with regard to D&D's internal presentation of how its game world works, I don't believe that the damage system bears out what Gary wrote about hit points being representative of several things. That's because, as noted, no such instances of that idea seems to appear in the mechanical operations of how the game works (and its stated representations of what those operations tell us about the game world) prior to 4E going out of its way to introduce them. Again, cure light wounds, bed rest, poisoned weapons that only take effect on a successful attack roll, etc.

4E changed things up in that regard, and 5E has kept some of that (though it looks to me like it walked at least some of it back in terms of prevalence), and I don't think acknowledging that it was a change is controversial.

 

[Aldarc]

Except it's quite clearly not the same, because the "hp can be injury or loss of resilience" paradigm first requires you to pick one or the other: injury or loss of resilience.

Are you gonna leave this claim unsupported? Why does this require anything of the sort other than your insistence that it does?

And because we're not told anything more, we then have to go in and fill in the blanks ourselves, rather than the game having done them for us. See the aforementioned problem of hit point loss that's injury, versus recovery that's upping your personal state of mind, to the point where you've successively lost more of the former and regained enough of the latter until it's hard to characterize how it is your character is still alive.

This amounts to making a problem out of nothing.

What you're doing here is essentially saying that you shouldn't sweat the small stuff, which is an implicit acknowledgment that the small stuff matters even if you don't deal with it. Forests are, at the end of the day, made up of trees, and so examining them can give you an overall picture of the health of the forest.

No, you are wrong here. I am doing nothing of the sort. What I am actually saying here is that you are misreading 4e. You are cherry-picking things out of context and misquoting the text without first putting them into context of the larger body of rules. No one will take your arguments about 4e seriously here if you can't be bothered or aren't willing to do your proper due diligence.

To extend the stair analogy, I'd rather buy a house that I might need to make some modest tweaks to than build my own dream home from the ground up. The interpretation that D&D makes of its own mechanical operations is a pre-fab house, and denying those is essentially knocking (parts of) it down so you can build something else. That's absolutely your prerogative, but it's undeniably a lot more work.

You may have lost sight of the argument in your choice to extend the stair analogy.

That said, trying to have a single mechanic pull double-duty in terms of representing different things still necessarily requires the people playing to adjudicate which one is being used in any given instance of that mechanic's use. Ergo, that's too far in the other direction for people who'd rather the game handle that on its own.

The mechanics of 4e tells you where the HP is coming from and what is causing its depletion/restoration in the fiction, but the game does not subscribe to your "double-duty" false dichotomy that you are presenting here. This requirement you are putting forth here feels made up.

It's more accurate to say you're in danger of not keeping up with how 4E is different from other editions.

I'm aware with how 4e is different from other editions in a number of key places. I am not denying that 4e is different from other editions, just as other editions are different from each other for various reasons. However, I don't think that it is so ontologically different as to be a wholly different species outside of the D&D family. Others have likewise made citations corroborating how 4e's understanding of HP is consistent with earlier editions.

On the contrary, 4E is extremely vague in terms of telling us what's happening from the in-game perspective, at least when compared to its predecessors. Hence why it can't make up its mind if hit point loss/recovery is an issue of injury or resilience. Remember, the vagueness comes from the fact that by having the same operation be one thing in one instance, and another in another instance, leaving the players to keep track of two different things via one mechanic over the course of play. That the individual applications aren't ambiguous isn't the issue; that they track them via the same operation is.

4e did make up its mind about what HP means, and it's quite clear about what it means. You said it yourself. It talked the talk and walked the walk of earlier editions about HP as being a variety of survival factors. And yet for some reason now you are claiming that the game is schizophrenic about it. You may not like 4e's answer and how it consistently applies that answer in the rules because it precludes your previous ability to read HP in your idiomatic way.

The powers rely on telling you that different things are represented via the same mechanical operation, which means that you have one thing representing multiple different things in the game world, quite possibly at the same time, due to the fact that 4E puts a premium on a gamist presentation and reduces its focus on (coherent) simulationism.

Citations needed.

I had a much more snarky response prepared, but that would go against the moderation note that was made earlier; I'll instead ask you to dial back the hostility.

It's certaintly not hostility to note that you were caught unawares by people who informed you about and explained 4e healing surges to you.

If they're not restoring "the same" hit points, then why does the character only have a single pool of hit points, from which all such operations take effect? That really goes to the heart of the issue here; if 4E had used a wound/vitality system, this wouldn't be an issue, and while I can certainly understand why it didn't (i.e. hit points having become a definitional characteristic of what D&D is), the fact is that the game unto itself suffered for it. If they're not "the same" hit points, they shouldn't be in "the same" pool.

Again, you yourself have noted that characters might not be regaining "the same" hit points that they lost. And yet there's only one pool of hit points. So which hit points are they regaining or losing in a given instance, and why should the player have to do the work of keeping those tallied over the course of play, presuming that they think that's important to do?

Because HP is an abstraction (much as @Mannahnin says) that measures a character or foe's overall ability to stay in a fight before dying or being killed. This is the answer we got from Gygax, and D&D, including 4e D&D, has been overall consistent with that understanding.

Yes, the cognitive gap exists:

You believe it exists. You assert that it exists. However, you now need to put in the work to convincingly show that it does exist.

when tracking hit point/loss recovery over the course of play, the onus is on the player to model the interplay of two different interpretations of the same mechanical operation in representing what's happening in the game world.

No, there is not in fact an onus on the player to model the interplay of these things at all. I am worried here that you are trying to argue that your personal issue HP representing more than physical wounds is somehow a universal one.

There's a gap, in other words, that the game doesn't bridge, leaving it up to their cognition to handle. That some players don't care doesn't mean it isn't there. The phenomenon of tying two (or more, as you've asserted) different ideas to this single operation is what creates it. It's a problem because some players (not all, but some) would rather not handle this task, particularly since it should be trivially easy for the game rules to handle it (and indeed, we've seen multiple ways that the game has handled it previously).

This argument does not effectively establish that a cognitive gap exists between the phenomena represented by HP. You're just repeating yourself in a circular argument that asserts the existence of this cognitive gap regarding HP exists as some sort of self-evident truth.

I think it's important not to put forward that you know what someone else's state of mind is, let alone accuse them of disingenuousness, if for no other reason than it ruins the tenor of the thread.

I'm not putting forth your state of mind nor am I accusing you of being disingenuous about anything. I am offering a possible explanation that you likely preferred the fact that HP was vague in other editions because that vagueness gave you license to read HP in your preferred way.

 

[Alzrius]

Are you gonna leave this claim unsupported? Why does this require anything of the sort other than your insistence that it does?

That's not a claim, it's an observation. Literally, if the game attaches two different representations to a single operation, then that's going to require an adjudication of which representation is active at a given time, whereas if there was only a single operation attached to an observation then no such adjudication is needed because that's the default. Quod erat demonstrandum.

This amounts to making a problem out of nothing.

I agree that 4E is making a problem out of nothing, in that it didn't have to go that route.

No, you are wrong here. I am doing nothing of the sort. What I am actually saying here is that you are misreading 4e. You are cherry-picking things out of context and misquoting the text without first putting them into context of the larger body of rules. No one will take your arguments about 4e seriously here if you can't be bothered or aren't willing to do your proper due diligence.

And I disagree, and note that you haven't actually demonstrated that the quotes are wrong, or that the larger context changes what's being observed. Quite the contrary, the context seems to go out of its way to sustain what I'm saying. The due diligence has already been put forward, and if you don't take it seriously, that's on you.

Just because you addressed it says nothing about whether you did so convincingly or not. It just means that you replied to a comment.

In which case you'd need to actually go back and read where it was addressed and respond to the substance of the argument, rather than the person making it.

You may have lost sight of the argument in your choice to extend the stair analogy.

"May" notes a possibility, and since the sight we're talking about is my own, I can therefore authoritatively state that possibility to not be the case; quite the contrary really.

The mechanics of 4e tells you where the HP is coming from and what is causing its depletion/restoration in the fiction, but the game does not subscribe to your "double-duty" false dichotomy that you are presenting here. This requirement you are putting forth here feels made up.

The mechanics of 4E tells you that hit point loss/restoration is coming from at least two different things, which address completely different aspects of the fiction (e.g. injury and resilience), but having all of those be represented at the mechanical level by a single mechanic means that mechanic is doing double-duty in order to present them. That's not a requirement, just a simple observation of facts.

I'm aware with how 4e is different from other editions in a number of key places. I am not denying that 4e is different from other editions, just as other editions are different from each other for various reasons. However, I don't think that it is so ontologically different as to be a wholly different species outside of the D&D family. Others have likewise made citations corroborating how 4e's understanding of HP is consistent with earlier editions.

Leaving aside the "outside of D&D family" bit, no such citations or corroboration were made; all that people seem to be able to do is point to Gygax's old essay in the AD&D 1E DMG, or insist that the game must never have had hit point loss/restoration be injury because otherwise it would be unrealistic (even though D&D was never realistic).

4e did make up its mind about what HP means, and it's quite clear about what it means. You said it yourself. It talked the talk and walked the walk of earlier editions about HP as being a variety of survival factors. And yet for some reason now you are claiming that the game is schizophrenic about it. You may not like 4e's answer and how it consistently applies that answer in the rules because it precludes your previous ability to read HP in your idiomatic way.

Vacillating between different things depending on the circumstance, while tying them all to a single mechanic, is not "making up its mind." It resolved itself to do multiple things at once, and then passed on the burden that created to the players, in a clear break from earlier versions of the game. Some people don't mind the extra work that creates, but it's undeniable that it does create extra work.

Citations needed.

See above, and on the previous page, and on the page before that, etc.

It's certaintly not hostility to note that you were caught unawares by people who informed you about and explained 4e healing surges to you.

Funny, this sounds like when you didn't know what a special pleading was.

Because HP is an abstraction (much as @Mannahnin says) that measures a character or foe's overall ability to stay in a fight before dying or being killed. This is the answer we got from Gygax, and D&D, including 4e D&D, has been overall consistent with that understanding.

Which then begs the question as to why Gygax didn't write a restore luck spell to bring back hit points, even after saying they could be luck, etc. It's almost as though the rest of what he wrote ignores that essay.

You believe it exists. You assert that it exists. However, you now need to put in the work to convincingly show that it does exist.

Which I've already done, multiple times over, even if you deny it. It's very hard to convince someone of something when they have a vested interest in not being convinced.

No, there is not in fact an onus on the player to model the interplay of these things at all. I am worried here that you are trying to argue that your personal issue HP representing more than physical wounds is somehow a universal one.

Literally, if the game attaches two things to a single mechanic, and doesn't differentiate between them, then it's moving that to the player. Remember your comment about "the same" hit points? That's the crux of the issue, right there.

This argument does not effectively establish that a cognitive gap exists between the phenomena represented by HP. You're just repeating yourself in a circular argument that asserts the existence of this cognitive gap regarding HP exists as some sort of self-evident truth.

On the contrary, you're simply denying what's already been established by saying "no, it's not established/real/convincing," which is ironically unconvincing itself.

I'm not putting forth your state of mind nor am I accusing you of being disingenuous about anything. I am offering a possible explanation that you likely preferred the fact that HP was vague in other editions because that vagueness gave you license to read HP in your preferred way.

Saying "I think you liked" something when the other person denies it is indeed putting forth to their state of mind, and accusing them of disingenuousness, even when you phrase it as "I just think that's the real reason you keep saying this." Own it.

 

[Alzrius]

@Aldarc

While I disagree very strongly with everything you've said, given that we've already both been warned by moderation and because I want this thread to remain open, I'm going to cease engaging with you on this topic.

 

[Mannahnin]

Leaving aside the "outside of D&D family" bit, no such citations or corroboration were made; all that people seem to be able to do is point to Gygax's old essay in the AD&D 1E DMG, or insist that the game must never have had hit point loss/restoration be injury because otherwise it would be unrealistic (even though D&D was never realistic).

I think this is the point at which I have to conclude that this exchange is no longer productive. It's become circular and you're repeating assertions which are objectively untrue.

 

[Voadam]

I disagree in that the "hit point loss/restoration is indicative of a non-injury change is status" paradigm is inherent, at least insofar as the earlier editions of D&D goes. As I noted before, the game was remarkably consistent in having its mechanics indicate that such things were interpreted as injury, e.g. cure light wounds spells, the manner in which non-magical healing was accomplished (i.e. bed rest), poisoned weapons taking effect only on a successful attack roll, etc.

By contrast, the "hit point loss/recovery as resilience/luck/divine protection/etc." paradigm only seems to have two sources that I can see: Gygax's essay in the AD&D 1E DMG (and later repetitions of the same idea) which aren't themselves mechanics and which don't match with what the game's operations tell us (i.e. the essay says hit points can be luck, and yet there is no restore luck spell), or alternatively, the idea that hit point loss cannot be injury because there's no concomitant loss of personal prowess, which is an appeal to a level of realism that D&D has never, in any incarnaton, attempted to portray.

So you are arguing that Lancelot and a giant, each taking hits from arrows doing the same damage, the hp are doing the same thing of purely physical injury? The hp are the same (a fraction of bodily health) and it is only the mechanical hit for x damage that is narratively different? So Lancelot is scratched by glancing arrow hits, and the giant is hit full on by arrows lodging in the giant but it is no big deal because of his mass?

Why is high hp Lancelot being scratched by hits while a low hp man at arms dies when hit?

Why does Lancelot have high hp? Why does skilled knight Lancelot have as many hp as a giant and more than a man at arms?

The easiest explanation would seem to be that hp, even in the damage is always some physical injury view, are also representing in part developed skill at staying alive that can be worn down as stamina is eroded, luck that can eventually be pushed too far, and/or limited protagonist plot armor/favor of the gods.

Lancelot as a skilled warrior is better at turning a well placed killing blow against him into a glancing one that causes little injury than the man at arms is. Mechanically represented in D&D by Lancelot's higher hp, not by a higher AC or damage reduction.

That is where I find the dual nature of hp is inherent in hp by level in older editions of D&D.

Now, the paradigm of hit point loss/recovery as injury/healing certainly isn't perfect; I've never said that it was! The scaling nature of how many hit points characters at different levels have versus the absolute values of the damage dealt can be off-putting, to be sure. But the game is still telling us that it's injury (as per the above examples), even if there are some corner cases where the model breaks down.

HP per level, different narrative explanations of what a hit for x damage does, experienced warriors requiring more rest to get back to fighting trim than wizards, requiring more magical healing to heal high level warriors who are banged up only a little than fragile non-combatants who are seriously wounded.

Versus the name cure light wounds in healing magic, the fact that rest restores hp (which seems as applicable for restoring stamina as actual wounds) and that a poisoned arrow must hit enough to scratch to poison someone. Also the lack of minor luck and prayer healing, no nonmagical morale hp healing before 4e.

 

[Alzrius]

I think this is the point at which I have to conclude that this exchange is no longer productive. It's become circular and you're repeating assertions which are objectively untrue.

I disagree with regard to what I've said being untrue, let alone objectively so, and think it's saying things like that which has unfortunately made the exchange unproductive.

 

[AnotherGuy]

From my perspective, and apologies if I'm retreading ground and this has been mentioned prior, I think the root of this discussion and the understanding of how hit points function within the game is the big divide between 3.x, 4e and 5e to the earlier editions of the game.

Editions prior to 3.x had hit points leaning primarily within the physical/injury category.

From 3.x onwards where hit points became uncapped so-to-speak, we got hit points serving two functions (physical and vitality). 4e leaned much heavier on the vitality side, while 5e dialed it back slightly.

After 40 years of the game, 5e with all its status conditions, never reconciled hit points to any injured or wounded condition. This tends me to think that loss of hit points are predominantly understood as vitality and any physical component to be seen as cuts, scrapes and bruises - with cuts being enough for poison to be effective.

EDIT: Does hit point loss signify injury of some sort? Yes
Is the injury meaningful? Depends on the amount of the loss and that's why 5e has short rests.

 

[Alzrius]

So you are arguing that Lancelot and a giant, each taking hits from arrows doing the same damage, the hp are doing the same thing of purely physical injury? The hp are the same (a fraction of bodily health) and it is only the mechanical hit for x damage that is narratively different? So Lancelot is scratched by glancing arrow hits, and the giant is hit full on by arrows lodging in the giant but it is no big deal because of his mass?

Why is high hp Lancelot being scratched by hits while a low hp man at arms dies when hit?

Why does Lancelot have high hp? Why does skilled knight Lancelot have as many hp as a giant and more than a man at arms?

The easiest explanation would seem to be that hp, even in the damage is always some physical injury view, are also representing in part developed skill at staying alive that can be worn down as stamina is eroded, luck that can eventually be pushed too far, and/or limited protagonist plot armor/favor of the gods.

Again, I don't believe that is the easiest explanation. Otherwise you end up in a situation like the one I pointed out before, where someone with 30 hit points takes 20 points of "fire damage" from a fireball (according to its keyword type), then recovers those hit points from inspiring word making him feel more inspired, and then takes another fireball later on that costs him those same 20 hit points again, which means that by now his injuries should have killed him, and yet he's still alive.

The issue of trying to scale the "hit point loss/recovery" paradigm as in either absolute or relative terms (relative to the character's total) is certainly an issue; I've said that before. Nor is it the only issue. But it at least lets the players start at the same basic level of understanding (i.e. that some degree of physical damage has been received) and then work things out from there, which is a step forward from where you'd be if you need to figure out whether or not damage has been dealt in the first place (and if so, how much).

Lancelot as a skilled warrior is better at turning a well placed killing blow against him into a glancing one that causes little injury than the man at arms is. Mechanically represented in D&D by Lancelot's higher hp, not by a higher AC or damage reduction.

That is where I find the dual nature of hp is inherent in hp by level in older editions of D&D.

I disagree. Lancelot's ability to turn a well-placed killing blow into a glancing one means that a blow is still being taken, ergo there's no "dual" aspect to it. Even if there's an issue of comparing the absolute value of the points of damage taken to the relative amount of the target's total, it's still an acknowledgment that some level of injury is what's being represented.

HP per level, different narrative explanations of what a hit for x damage does, experienced warriors requiring more rest to get back to fighting trim than wizards, requiring more magical healing to heal high level warriors who are banged up only a little than fragile non-combatants who are seriously wounded.

Versus the name cure light wounds in healing magic, the fact that rest restores hp (which seems as applicable for restoring stamina as actual wounds) and that a poisoned arrow must hit enough to scratch to poison someone. Also the lack of minor luck and prayer healing, no nonmagical morale hp healing before 4e.

Which is, I suppose, a decent area where each model approaches its limits (also, thanks for confirming the lack of nonmagical morale healing before 4E!). To me, "different narrative explanations" strikes close to the core of the issue, insofar as playing an RPG goes, but YMMV.

 

[Kannik]

But ... look. He contained multitudes. If you want to find something to contradict what Gygax wrote, you won't have to look far. Because Gygax contradicted himself. Often. Often in the same lengthy paragraph.

Natch, for sure. We all do (contain multitudes). Inconsistencies, biases, inconsistencies, all come with the territory of being human. And...

When talking about the lengthy time for physical hearing, he just kind of ... I dunno, says that it takes that long to get to your peak physical and metaphysical ability.

I think it is more accurate to say that Gygax started D&D on the original path of providing ... well, something for everyone (but not really being the best at any one thing). You can always find what you're looking for, and it's always a reflection of what you want.

Exactly. As I noted in my post, I don't fault nor denigrate anyone for having an HP=Only Meat take on it, nor do I think it's a necessarily a problem to do so. If it works for them in their games, cool! And it wasn't, and isn't, a universal take on what HP are. To bounce off of 4e's expanded way of interacting with HP is alright too. That's your tastes and your take, just not something that 4e somehow mangled or invented from whole cloth.

(As an aside, without Gary's peculiarities, I likely never would've had the delightful Bohemian Ear Spoon enter my lexicon, and what a unfortunate thing that would have been... )