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

[Thomas Shey]

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.

Of course then you'd have people really soggy about the (admittedly) gaminess of the rule (as happens with the 13th Age case). That's why I say this is so intractable; there's a set of desires in play that are, fundamentally contradictory, sometimes on the same people. And solutions satisfactory to some are not only suboptimal to others, they're sometimes actively offputting (the round to round thing you mention with the Crusader would drive some people absolutely up a wall).

 

[Pedantic]

That just moves the problem around. Then people just tend to either over-hoard the resources or swing between too much use and too little. Believe me, I've seen it in other systems when they were, from lack of a better term, daily resources.

I'm only half joking about the time records. The most satisfying adventure path I've played placed PCs on a week long rest schedule, required them to get back to a safe town, and had a timeline of events triggered week by week based on the threats the PCs hadn't dealt with that occurred while they were down for each week. It was quite clear to players that every time they stopped, things would progress, usually to their detriment.

I've been playing around with adapting the model to a more generalizable faction/threat system to move around between games.

 

[Voadam]

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.

My brother and I played as a two person AD&D party for a while, I played a human fighter dual classed to wizard, he played a deep gnome fighter. It was great but I remember after tussling with some gargoyles once I was out for a couple of weeks recuperating in a cave with him watching over me before pressing deeper into the cavern complex to even check out the second chamber.

Much different experience than when we hooked up with the rest of our friend group who had a half-elven fighter cleric and a specialty priest of a cat god as PCs.

 

[Thomas Shey]

My brother and I played as a two person AD&D party for a while, I played a human fighter dual classed to wizard, he played a deep gnome fighter. It was great but I remember after tussling with some gargoyles once I was out for a couple of weeks recuperating in a cave with him watching over me before pressing deeper into the cavern complex to even check out the second chamber.

Much different experience than when we hooked up with the rest of our friend group who had a half-elven fighter cleric and a specialty priest of a cat god as PCs.

The vast majority of OD&D games I saw in my younger days were 6 player/2 characters apiece games. Lack of clerics was never a problem.

 

[Voadam]

The vast majority of OD&D games I saw in my younger days were 6 player/2 characters apiece games. Lack of clerics was never a problem.

OD&D was like Basic, clerics did not get a cure spell until second level. It quickly became similar to AD&D where wisdom gave starting 1st level clerics three spells to start and cure spells can be the standard healing of the game, but there is that starting situation where nobody has any curing magic for a little while.

 

[tomBitonti]

Apologies up front for the mathy-ness of this note.

In my view, hit points aren't trying to directly simulate anything. Hit points do relate to all manner of character state, for example, Health, Vigor, and Divine Favor. The relationship, however, is indirect: Hit points are intended to represent an expectation of how many successful attacks the character should be able to receive before being rendered unable to act (before being "taken out" of a fight).

For example, if a character should, on average, require two successful attacks to be taken out, then that character has two hit points, scaled upwards to enable attacks of different relative strengths. Then, if a character can survive two sword attacks, and a sword attack is assigned a relative strength of 4, then the character is given 8 hit points, and a sword attack is assigned either 4, or, for greater variability, 1-7 hit points of damage.

Then, attempting to relate "hit points" directly to actual damage is not a meaningful exercise. Hit points are a way of mapping out a probability space, in which "attacks" inevitably lead to "damage", but only as an eventual outcome, not as an immediate consequence.

TomB

 

[Kannik]

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.

While I disagree that multiple HP tracks would have been a 'better' option for D&D specifically, a simple name change on certain things could well have led to less misinterpretation.

Also, if you like the idea of different types of damage requiring different types of healing (and this is starting to get off topic so I'll keep it short and we can split off into another thread), something like the Stress + Trauma option in Cortex Prime might fit the bill. Stress is 'generic' (and also affects your effectiveness in Cortex, wouldn't necessarily need to in a D&D variant) and when it's depleted you are taken out until the next scene, where you gain a starting amount of Trauma (that also affects your effectiveness) that is keyed to and related to what took you out. Stress recovers quickly, but Trauma does not, and what's required to recover Trauma depends on it's type. Could strike a good balance between generic HP for quickness and more specificity when someone goes down.

Wise move? Hindsight would suggest probably not.

It was the initiation point and foundation for many of the assumptions and mechanics in 5e, the most popular version of D&D thus far. And it only caused a subset of a subset to enflame based on misinterpretations. I'd say it was, at worst, neutral.

(Mechanics wise, on the whole I'd say it was a definite positive for gameplay.)

 

[Thomas Shey]

OD&D was like Basic, clerics did not get a cure spell until second level. It quickly became similar to AD&D where wisdom gave starting 1st level clerics three spells to start and cure spells can be the standard healing of the game, but there is that starting situation where nobody has any curing magic for a little while.

Yeah, but unless you're constantly restarting campaigns, that rectifies itself and then from that point onward there's always clerics around with the numbers I quoted. Remember that in a lot of early OD&D campaigns you just had kind of an ongoing sprawl of new and old characters showing up, and most of the ones I saw on the West Coast were like that.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Apologies up front for the mathy-ness of this note.

In my view, hit points aren't trying to directly simulate anything. Hit points do relate to all manner of character state, for example, Health, Vigor, and Divine Favor. The relationship, however, is indirect: Hit points are intended to represent an expectation of how many successful attacks the character should be able to receive before being rendered unable to act (before being "taken out" of a fight).

For example, if a character should, on average, require two successful attacks to be taken out, then that character has two hit points, scaled upwards to enable attacks of different relative strengths. Then, if a character can survive two sword attacks, and a sword attack is assigned a relative strength of 4, then the character is given 8 hit points, and a sword attack is assigned either 4, or, for greater variability, 1-7 hit points of damage.

Then, attempting to relate "hit points" directly to actual damage is not a meaningful exercise. Hit points are a way of mapping out a probability space, in which "attacks" inevitably lead to "damage", but only as an eventual outcome, not as an immediate consequence.

TomB

The problem with this is there are a lot of other game elements that are, effectively, forced to relate to them as actual damage to some degree, because their relevance doesn't begin and end at how many attacks from a given opponent will take them down; they also are used for things like falling, as the indicator of whether poison can be delivered, and to determine how long before the character is fully ready to fight again and what is needed to get them there.

So in practice, stopping at your statement is just not a thing that is going to happen.

 

[tomBitonti]

The problem with this is there are a lot of other game elements that are, effectively, forced to relate to them as actual damage to some degree, because their relevance doesn't begin and end at how many attacks from a given opponent will take them down; they also are used for things like falling, as the indicator of whether poison can be delivered, and to determine how long before the character is fully ready to fight again and what is needed to get them there.

So in practice, stopping at your statement is just not a thing that is going to happen.

I entirely agree. The view of hit points that I presented is hard to align with events which should be directly damaging.

For example, there is little that can be done to avoid damage from a fall. Then, a more realistic way of handling fall damage might be to represent it as a coup-de-grace. Or to use escalating damage (1d6, 3d6, 6d6, 10d6, and so forth).

But, most games don't use these more realistic methods. My sense of this is that, having accepted hit points as a measure of survivability, folks prefer to dial back the lethality of events such as falling. (Which, in my experience, matches an avoidance to use of coup-de-grace rules. They are there, in 3E, but they don't seem to be used much.)

Folks also seem to like hit point restoration as a mechanic, although, this makes no sense in the probabilistic model that I provided.

The theme here is that the game has invented a whole set of processes and expectations relating to gaining and losing hit points, taking the idea quite far away from either the probabilistic model or a basic idea of being physically damaged and being healed.

The result is, for many folks, a quite playable game, with a consequence of there being a fundamental limit to the meaning of hit points. Play the game, and don't push too hard on this mechanic.

TomB