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

[Voadam]

This is, honestly, an issue that comes up in almost any system with limited but regenerative resources. I'm not sure there's a general fix for it.

It is a matter of taste.

For some the daily paradigm with considerations of attrition across a day for possibly multiple encounters and expected encounter estimation, the variations of experience from novaing, hoarding, or spreading out dailies, the consequence and experience of running on empty are all positives and not negatives. For some there is a sweet spot of daily resource management versus others that varies by individual taste.

For me the paradigm of tactical at will and encounter based powers and round to round choices is a preferable focus that is more fun for me than daily strategic resource management. I am at heart risk averse and will hoard strategic resources for emergencies and not use them, even when I want to be a pulpy action hero in the thick of battles. With at will stuff I am emotionally more comfortable using my stuff.

I have played a vancian AD&D wizards with charged items and had fun doing so, but daily and limited charges then gone items are not my preferred resource management models.

 

[deganawida]

Are you talking smooth jazz, fusion jazz, classical jazz, or “jazz” that is really just R&B?

Don’t forget acid jazz (my personal favorite).

 

[Voadam]

If one were being fair, would one not also look at how one recovers hit points, no?
Given that recovery was slow, and that there were no short rests, 2nd winds, healing surges, HD spend or other ambiguous powers on how one healed hit points, it is fair to say that recovery affected in the main physical damage.

My experience is that pre-3e healing was by cleric cure light wound spells, sometimes downtime measured in how many days it took the cleric to bring the party back to full when memorizing nothing but cures. Healing potions were also used in the field. At high levels heal was the big gun healing everything in one shot.

The exception was when there was no cleric and so weeks of downtime could be regularly required after a single fight.

3e's big innovation was the cheap available cure light wounds wand for healing to full between every fight multiple times more than a spellcaster could, and used by two thirds of the classes (bards, clerics, druids, rangers, paladins, and rogues and sorcerers with UMD).

 

[Willie the Duck]

My experience is that pre-3e healing was by cleric cure light wound spells, sometimes downtime measured in how many days it took the cleric to bring the party back to full when memorizing nothing but cures. Healing potions were also used in the field. At high levels heal was the big gun healing everything in one shot.

Similar, although I also recall a lot of homebrew improved natural healing rules, magic items of fast-healing, healer kits (class kits, not items), and so on.

 

[James Gasik]

Or slightly simpler, do what The Nightmares Underneath does, which I talked about in a prior post (in spoiler tags).

Hit Points (Disposition) are your ability to defend yourself/resist defeat, and damage past them goes to Constitution (Health). Once you suffer Con (Health) damage you have a chance of being knocked unconscious, may be bleeding, suffer lingering injuries, etc. You die when your Health is reduced to zero or if a fatal injury is sustained based on location.

And the spells and mundane means which heal one or the other are different.
(Note: apparently this was tweaked with a Wounds score in 2nd ed)

That Fantasy Craft line was supposed to be deleted, lol.

 

[pemerton]

If one were being fair, would one not also look at how one recovers hit points, no?
Given that recovery was slow, and that there were no short rests, 2nd winds, healing surges, HD spend or other ambiguous powers on how one healed hit points, it is fair to say that recovery affected in the main physical damage.

At least in my personal experience, significant physical injury does not recover in a week of rest. A week of rest is for getting over the flu.

So I think that the recovery in AD&D can be whatever one wants it to be. For me, and taken together with the rest of the hp package. it seems more like regaining stamina, resolve and "metaphysical" hit points, than recovery from significant physical harm.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I would be worried that this sort of design would potentially be more hassle than it's worth and possibly a case of over-engineering. I think that there is a reason that HP tends to endure across a lot of tabletop and video games. It's easy and straightforward to understand as a game mechanic. It's really only edge cases that rub a small subset of people the wrong way, though I think that is due to their own preferences.

I do tend to think of straight hit point solutions as a big blunt object of RPG design, but I only really bring it up when people insist on pressing on it in certain ways, especially with significant advancement elevation of it (i.e. level elevating hit points and their kin). My own feeling about how its endured is like a lot of other mechanics--D&D has such a big shadow that people have to very proactively want something else not to just drop into its model. It doesn't say much about what people want so much as what they don't not-want strongly enough to care, and what they're used to from other places. I suspect if D&D had done some kind of wound threshold thing or the like from get-go, that's what you'd see all over everything.

 

[Thomas Shey]

It is a matter of taste.

For some the daily paradigm with considerations of attrition across a day for possibly multiple encounters and expected encounter estimation, the variations of experience from novaing, hoarding, or spreading out dailies, the consequence and experience of running on empty are all positives and not negatives. For some there is a sweet spot of daily resource management versus others that varies by individual taste.

For me the paradigm of tactical at will and encounter based powers and round to round choices is a preferable focus that is more fun for me than daily strategic resource management. I am at heart risk averse and will hoard strategic resources for emergencies and not use them, even when I want to be a pulpy action hero in the thick of battles. With at will stuff I am emotionally more comfortable using my stuff.

I have played a vancian AD&D wizards with charged items and had fun doing so, but daily and limited charges then gone items are not my preferred resource management models.

The problem is that my sense is that there's a lot of people out there who want it both ways; they don't want to be constantly micromanaging resources, but want them (at least in a lot of contexts) to not be just open-ended usable, and don't want the perverse incentives of novaing. That's a very hard row to hoe. The fact it usually only applies to a subset of characters (casters in D&D) also complicates other design choices.

 

[Thomas Shey]

My experience is that pre-3e healing was by cleric cure light wound spells, sometimes downtime measured in how many days it took the cleric to bring the party back to full when memorizing nothing but cures. Healing potions were also used in the field. At high levels heal was the big gun healing everything in one shot.

That's pretty much what I saw back in my OD&D days.

The exception was when there was no cleric and so weeks of downtime could be regularly required after a single fight.

On the other hand, the game culture of places I played and GMed in were such that I never actually saw this occur; it was an entirely theoretical case.

 

[Pedantic]

The problem is that my sense is that there's a lot of people out there who want it both ways; they don't want to be constantly micromanaging resources, but want them (at least in a lot of contexts) to not be just open-ended usable, and don't want the perverse incentives of novaing. That's a very hard row to hoe. The fact it usually only applies to a subset of characters (casters in D&D) also complicates other design choices.

I think randomized resources are under explored in TTRPGs in general. Something like the ToB Crusader, who doesn't know exactly what they'll have at their disposal round to round. Unfortunately, they kind of design doesn't play well without hard combat/non-combat delineation. You could maybe use something like 13th Age's fixed number of encounters/triggers before resting, or FC's fixed "Scene" refreshes, and then lean in to different systems to offer players semi-randomized resources within those. That gives you big nova-level abilities, no real incentive to save them and a puzzle to figure out between refreshes.