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

[Pedantic]

The fundamental argument continues to be whether or not 4e actually represents a significant change in the treatment of hit points...except I think that's kind of a sideshow. It doesn't really matter if that's true about D&D in some greater sense if a chunk of the audience felt like it did and was thereby alienated. If anything, it just suggests a hidden sacred cow that the designers did not realize they were slaughtering....it has just occurred to me right now that "sacred cow" is kind of obviously offensive as it refers disparagingly to real world religious practice. Is there a sensible replacement idiom around?

 

[Mannahnin]

I seem to have a hazy recollection that there was a period during OD&D's development when all there was was wizards and fighters, so the latter is possible. It was just in the rear view mirror by the time of publication, so the statement threw me.

Yes, there was definitely a period of Dave Arneson's original Blackmoor game before Clerics. The legend as I recall goes that the class was introduced as a counter to Sir Fang, a vampire PC, Dave drawing inspiration from Van Helsing in the Hammer Horror films, and it being crossed with a Bishop Odo-style crusading priest so as to make it more medieval.

 

[Lanefan]

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 don't think he was lying; but I do think he missed a design step that, if taken would have made the mechanics and the fiction connect much better with each other: different types of hit points for different things.

Here, we call them body points (mostly representing real physical injuries) and fatigue points (mostly representing the luck-fatigue-notmeat side of hit points).

Note that I very carefully (and very intentionally) say "mostly" for both of those....

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.

... because - while not to the hyperventilated degree of these boards - we did go through these discussions and arguments a long time ago, and concluded that fatigue points always had a meat aspect to them (though oftentimes this would be trivial, expressed as minor nicks and scratches) in order to both allow poison to work as intended and to allow combatants to vaguely assess the condition of their foes; and that body points much less often had a not-meat aspect to them.

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.

What the 4e designers did here, I think, was take a tricky game element (i.e. "what are hit ponbts, anyway?") that many up until then had kinda swept under the rug, and try to actively incorporate it into the design; and in so doing they (maybe unintentionally) shone a spotlight on it.

Necessary move? Opinions will vary; I personally don't see the point of having done this, but that merely squares with my view of a fair number of 4e's design decisions.

Wise move? Hindsight would suggest probably not.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The fundamental argument continues to be whether or not 4e actually represents a significant change in the treatment of hit points...except I think that's kind of a sideshow. It doesn't really matter if that's true about D&D in some greater sense if a chunk of the audience felt like it did and was thereby alienated. If anything, it just suggests a hidden sacred cow that the designers did not realize they were slaughtering....it has just occurred to me right now that "sacred cow" is kind of obviously offensive as it refers disparagingly to real world religious practice. Is there a sensible replacement idiom around?

I largely agree with your statement--and I don't know of a good answer to your question.

Its like the issues I had with 4e, which are partly one I believe you mentioned earlier (Skill Challenges are a clever idea that in action felt to me stale and overly mechanistic) and partly a more broad feeling that the system had reified some of the least authentic feeling parts of D&D to me (one of the reasons I've harped on the hit point thing so much).

But much of these was really very much a matter of perception. Taking an analytical look at the game, Skill Challenges were simply an attempt to avoid the excessive special-casing D&D has been a poster child for (and that I've complained about any number of times), and the fact there was, from my POV, a price for that is not a great indictment. Other elements of the rework were attempts to bring coherence to a rules set that I've often found sadly lacking in that, and make the game elements actually interesting (in a way that in theory I like).

So it goes to show that someone can be setting out with reasonable purposes and even on the face of it, reasonably methodology and still, from some of the market, thoroughly miss the mark.

 

[Lanefan]

The idea that "I know that I'm injured", but know nothing of where, or how; and this ostensible injury does not actually have any significance to play - it doesn't impede me, or make me more vulnerable, or require any special approach to treatment or recovery - seems utterly empty to me.

With the rare exception, of course, of having had a limb removed by a weapon of sharpness (do those still exist in 4e-5e?) or rendered useless by the Wither spell. There were also a few traps in published modules intended to cause specific injuries - I recall one that was set to chop the hand off whoever reached into a hole without first disarming the trap - but for the most part D&D has never had any sort of called-shot or injury-location system.

 

[Lanefan]

Again, the game is silent about whether your burns go away. You choose to read "heal" to mean that "your burns go away," but in the context of 4e rules, we are told that healing only represents the regaining of HP, which are a variety of aspects of a character's combat vigor. Nothing more.

Which leads to another, tangential idea: there's valid design space for curatives that only work on one type of "injury", but for those to function there needs to be more clarity around defining injury types.

The example here would be a (probably aloe-based) potion or salve that cures burns just fine but isn't any use for any other type of injury. Other possibilities would be having potions or salves (or spells, for all that) that only cure physical injury, while having others that only restore fatigue-stamina-etc. but leave the actual body just as nicked and bruised as it was before. The possibilities are, if not endless, certainly vast.

It would take some minor kitbashing to any edition to insert this idea, though there was a 1e-era Dragon article about magical herbs that waved at it with its inclusion of a few herbs that did injury-type-specific curing.

 

[soviet]

I have 17 hit points and a grue stabs me for 16 damage. I have 1 hit point left. I can move, fight, dance, and play the drums exactly as well as before. The next morning I wake up and I am soon back to full hit points. The incident leaves no lasting effect at all.

I have 16 hit points and a grue stabs me for 16 damage, I have no hit points left. Depending on edition I am either dead or making death saves.

Is the first one an injury? It had no lasting effect and it went away the next morning (or a few days later in different editions).

Is the second one an injury? It killed me, or put me at death's door.

Should we describe the two attacks in the same way? They have the same attacker, the same defender, the same situation, and the same attack and damage rolls. The only difference is whether my character had one more hit point in the tank or not.

 

[soviet]

Which leads to another, tangential idea: there's valid design space for curatives that only work on one type of "injury", but for those to function there needs to be more clarity around defining injury types.

The example here would be a (probably aloe-based) potion or salve that cures burns just fine but isn't any use for any other type of injury. Other possibilities would be having potions or salves (or spells, for all that) that only cure physical injury, while having others that only restore fatigue-stamina-etc. but leave the actual body just as nicked and bruised as it was before. The possibilities are, if not endless, certainly vast.

It would take some minor kitbashing to any edition to insert this idea, though there was a 1e-era Dragon article about magical herbs that waved at it with its inclusion of a few herbs that did injury-type-specific curing.

Rolemaster is good for this stuff. You have crits that cover bodily injury, you have hits (hit points) that cover your stamina and ability to keep going, you have bleeding which slowly saps your hit points, and you have stun effects from crits that put you into shock. All of these are treated and recovered from in different ways. There are a bunch of healing herbs and healing magics that deal with some parts but not others (i.e. the Burn Relief spell heals hit point damage from heat attacks, this herb stops bleeding per round, this herb or spell heals broken bones, this skill reduces stun rounds, etc).

 

[Voadam]

Is the first one an injury? It had no lasting effect and it went away the next morning (or a few days later in different editions).

Over two weeks in 1e to rest up to recover 16 hp. Who knows in Moldvay Basic.

 

[Voadam]

4e hp did a couple things as innovations.

1 Healing surges for proportional healing to deal with the high hp character slow healing for minor proportion of wounds, low hp character quick healing for high level of wounds issue.

2 Healing in combat, allowing healers to heal and do an attack so it was often a decently optimized action to take and not a sacrifice of action for group survival.

3 Allow a non-magical healer class for those low magic or Dragonlance type settings.

4 Allow everybody to decently heal themselves between combats, short rest healing surges mean no cure wound wand dependency narratively for the same effect. (optionally there in 3.5 with reserve points alt rule)

5 Full hp healing with long rest for no days of downtime for spells or natural healing to do it. Focus on the action day, less downtime days accounting. Allowed retreat to safe spot then get back in the action.

6 Healing surge limits for a maximum of per day healing resources.

7 Healing surges varying by class role, so amount you can heal varies by role allowing defenders to be more tanks and pull more aggro.

8 Flat hp advancement by class/role, 3e had it as an option, it was now core.