D&D General D&D Editions: Anybody Else Feel Like They Don't Fit In?

[Lanefan]

This "Vitality" pool would also only come back slowly. I wouldn't do 1/week myself because I consider that overwhelmingly punitive, but different groups could certainly go for varying rates at which they're recovered. No HP healing, or at least none of any meaningful/repeatable source, could be had unless you have Vitality to support it. If you want heals, you need to spend Vitality to get it.

In this context, the Vitality pool could not be restored by spells. Nothing--nothing at all--except rest could restore them, though maybe you could use magic to exchange them between people. And if you run out of Hit Points while your Vitality pool is empty...good luck!

If we were to call our points "Wound" and "Vitality" instead of Body and Fatigue, we'd be doing the opposite of what you suggest here. Vitality (i.e. Fatigue) are easier to rest back and-or cure than are Wound (i.e. Body) points.

They're not two separate pools, as @dave2008 seems to have. Rather, your Vitality points sit on top of your Wound points and (with extremely rare corner-case exceptions usually involving loss of a limb) you don't start taking Wound point damage until you've run out of Vitality points.

A combination of species (which sets the die size) and your Con score (which sets a floor) determines how many Wound points you have; this is rolled once and that number - again barring extreme corner cases - is then locked in for life. For example, a Human rolls a d5 for Wound points while a Dwarf rolls d6 and an Elf rolls d4. Con higher than very low sets a floor of 2, meaning if your roll is 1 it becomes 2; Con 15+ sets that floor at 3 instead. Actual Con bonus does NOT apply to this roll.

Then you roll your hit points by class and these become your Vitality points. So, a Human Fighter with 16 Con rolls a d5 for Wound points (with possible results 3-3-3-4-5 due to her high Con setting a floor of 3) and then rolls d10+2 for Vitality points. If, say, she rolls 4 Wound and [5+2=] 7 Vitality points total, she will start at 1st level with 11 hit points.

This also helps with the meat-luck divide: Fatigue (Vitality) points are mostly but not entirely luck - there's always a small 'meat' element - while Body (Wound) points are, as the name would suggest, entirely meat.

 

[Willie the Duck]

The fact Kinks and Cantrips for D&D is a Mithral Best Seller on Drive-Thru has me all sorts of confused about the current state of the game and its fandom...

There's been a vein of that ore in the game and community since the beginning. It started out in the official products, even.

 

[Morrus]

We escaped the Y2T bug only to enter the age of "snow flakes mechanics". The new motto: do not frustrate or hurt the feelings and emotions of the kids. This turning point was enforced with 4th and 5th editions. Now, in the Monster Manual, they call wolves what we nicknamed long-hair chihuahua! And what could be said when a single campaign can bring you from level 1 to level 20?

Yes, yes, we get it. You're simply superior to the rest of us 'snowflakes'. How about your take your generational war nonsense somewhere else, please, and drop the namecalling and insults directed at people who don't pretend to be an elf the same way you do? They have no place on this forum. Thank you.

 

[dave2008]

This "Vitality" pool would also only come back slowly. I wouldn't do 1/week myself because I consider that overwhelmingly punitive, but different groups could certainly go for varying rates at which they're recovered. No HP healing, or at least none of any meaningful/repeatable source, could be had unless you have Vitality to support it. If you want heals, you need to spend Vitality to get it.

In this context, the Vitality pool could not be restored by spells. Nothing--nothing at all--except rest could restore them, though maybe you could use magic to exchange them between people. And if you run out of Hit Points while your Vitality pool is empty...good luck!

I think I am being unclear. I don't understand how you think your suggestion is an improvement to what we are already doing. If anything, I see your proposal as unnecessarily confusing/conflating the two pools. The value, IMO, of the way we do it is that they are separate. What, in your mind, is the value of transferring Vitality Points to Hit Points?

I guess I should also clarify what BHP are: Bloodied Hit Points are measure of the physical damage a creature, item, or structure can take before it ceases to function. For creatures, that means your dead at 0, for a wagon (or similar nonliving thing) it means it no longer resembles / functions as a wagon. It is not 100% obliteration.

That is also why I don't like the term Vitality Points. I think Hit Points describe vitality well, we want something specific to physical damage.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I think I am being unclear. I don't understand how you think your suggestion is an improvement to what we are already doing. If anything, I see your proposal as unnecessarily confusing/conflating the two pools. The value, IMO, of the way we do it is that they are separate. What, in your mind, is the value of transferring Vitality Points to Hit Points?

I guess I should also clarify what BHP are: Bloodied Hit Points are measure of the physical damage a creature, item, or structure can take before it ceases to function. For creatures, that means your dead at 0, for a wagon (or similar nonliving thing) it means it no longer resembles / functions as a wagon. It is not 100% obliteration.

That is also why I don't like the term Vitality Points. I think Hit Points describe vitality well, we want something specific to physical damage.

Well, I was sort of using you as a guinea pig here.

The system I proposed...is Healing Surges from 4e. Separate pools, where you refill the main, usable pool from the second, hard-to-access, hard-to-refill pool that doesn't directly protect you from death.

Surges vs HP is functionally a Wounds vs Vitality system, doubly so since 4e frequently used "you lose a surge" as a cost for various other forms of failure (e.g. Dark Sun's harsh wilderness often saps your surges if you can't beat the heat or run out of food/water) or for powering up various things (e.g. an item might require you to spend a surge in order to use it, but the effect would be rather more potent than an item without such a cost.) Hardier classes naturally have more surges, and your Con modifier determines how many additional surges you get (so a Fighter with low Con might not actually be that far ahead of a Wizard with high Con!)

 

[dave2008]

Well, I was sort of using you as a guinea pig here.

The system I proposed...is Healing Surges from 4e. Separate pools, where you refill the main, usable pool from the second, hard-to-access, hard-to-refill pool that doesn't directly protect you from death.

Surges vs HP is functionally a Wounds vs Vitality system, doubly so since 4e frequently used "you lose a surge" as a cost for various other forms of failure (e.g. Dark Sun's harsh wilderness often saps your surges if you can't beat the heat or run out of food/water) or for powering up various things (e.g. an item might require you to spend a surge in order to use it, but the effect would be rather more potent than an item without such a cost.) Hardier classes naturally have more surges, and your Con modifier determines how many additional surges you get (so a Fighter with low Con might not actually be that far ahead of a Wizard with high Con!)

I always thought of HP and surges as both vitality in 4e. The fact that they interacted the way they did made it clear to me. IMO, there are no wound points in 4e (or any edition of D&D).

For us, HP & HS did not fulfill our desire for wound points. It was 4e that gave us the idea to create Bloodied Hit Points and we developed our house-rules when we played 4e. We just carried them over to 5e.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I always thought of HP and surges as both vitality in 4e. The fact that they interacted the way they did made it clear to me. IMO, there are no wound points in 4e (or any edition of D&D).

For us, HP & HS did not fulfill our desire for wound points. It was 4e that gave us the idea to create Bloodied Hit Points and we developed our house-rules when we played 4e. We just carried them over to 5e.

I don't really see why surges are "just" more HP, but your BHP aren't? That is, I don't see what the gulf between the two systems is.

My understanding is that "Vitality"-type systems, including standard D&D HP, refers to the stuff you can burn up easily without suffering long-term problems. It's the "luck points" as opposed to "meat points", to use the perhaps trite terms a lot of people use for this. Being dropped to 0 HP puts you on a timer, but you have resources that can be expended to pull you back from the brink. Those resources are "Wounds", and you can't recover those swiftly or simply. 4e is somewhat different in that you can do one-way conversion of "Wounds" into extra "Vitality", but otherwise pretty much in line with any other such system.

In some ways, the standard HP and surge recovery of 4e is more lenient, but in other ways much, much less so. Your BHP can be recovered by magic--quite easily, in fact. A single casting of cure wounds, even at level 1, has a better-than-even chance of doing so (2d8+3 averages 2x4.5+3 = 12; you'd need to roll a small but noticeable amount below average); cast by a Life Cleric, it's almost guaranteed to do so (2d8+6 averages 15; you'd need to roll the lowest or second-lowest result.) If upcast, even a single level, it functionally guarantees BHP restoration (4d8+3 averages 21)--meaning a single day is enough to restore most lost BHP, if the party healer spends it doing nothing but casting heals, unless you reduce the rate of spell-slot recovery to match, at which point all you've really done is rescale the timing so the whole campaign moves at a slower pace, but the per-session timing wouldn't meaningfully differ.

The one and only part that isn't there is the "this literally makes something cease to function", and I just...I don't really see what value that has? Like I'm genuinely unsure why having BHP which achieve that thing is...a thing you want to do. Having 0 HP already means the function of something is in danger of ceasing. Being dead already means the function of something has stopped. I don't see what is added by having this...other track of death?

 

[Lanefan]

In the Star Wars system where Wound and Vitality points first appeared in a published game (that I know of) they worked kind of like ours do - the VP sat on top of the WP and you burned through VP before taking WP damage - only you'd have (relatively) way more WP there than you would in our system.

The biggest issue with how SW did it was that too many damage types/sources bypassed VP and went straight to WP. But they were all still hit points.

What's being talked about here is foreign to me, where you spend one type of hit point in order to recover another. On the surface, that seems much more complex than how us or the SW game do it.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

In the Star Wars system where Wound and Vitality points first appeared in a published game (that I know of) they worked kind of like ours do - the VP sat on top of the WP and you burned through VP before taking WP damage - only you'd have (relatively) way more WP there than you would in our system.

The biggest issue with how SW did it was that too many damage types/sources bypassed VP and went straight to WP. But they were all still hit points.

What's being talked about here is foreign to me, where you spend one type of hit point in order to recover another. On the surface, that seems much more complex than how us or the SW game do it.

Perhaps it is more complicated--but intricacy for some benefit is no sin, if the benefit is worth it.

In this case, the benefit of Healing Surges (which are 4e's "Wound" points) is that they can be deducted separately from hit points, in ways that are always costly to a given character, no matter what level they are.

So, to give some examples:

• As noted, in 4e Dark Sun, losing Surges because traveling through the wastes is hard is a common occurrence. But this then directly leads to knock-on behaviors: players have a clear, direct incentive to protect their food and water supply (can't regain surges if you can't rest, can't take a long rest if you don't have food and water), to avoid conflict when possible (Dark Sun monsters are MEAN, and unforced combat is a huge risk), and to consider options or features that might otherwise be overlooked, such as the Endurance skill or the Tough feat.
• By having Surges come in chunky blocks rather than the fine-grit sand of HP, you can punch the players where it hurts, in a way they can clearly see. An enemy that steals healing surges is very scary, for example, since that's directly reducing your ability to fight. But this is a cost that scales cleanly across any character level, because surges have scaling value, while a fixed quantity of HP will always become less and less scary until eventually it's a speedbump. Even in old-school D&D, this was true (it's pretty much the root of Gygax's argument for why HP can't be meat points), so the DM has a powerful tool in the toolbox for motivating or scaring PCs by including them.
• Consider the problem of "cursed" gear. In most cases, most players will be far too afraid of the negative consequences of a "curse" to ever take it, even if they know it's quite powerful, particularly since most "cursed" equipment either risks literally surrendering your character for a mere momentary power boost, or suffering some permanent debility or the like. But what if you could get (say) a +5 sword...but you must sacrifice your own life-force to it in order to get that power, otherwise it's barely more than adequate as a weapon. Now you have the temptation of "minor" sacrifice for major power. And you can even leverage it further--perhaps the more surges you feed it, the stronger it becomes, but the more power it can exert over you--allowing an actual slow, creeping change rather than what D&D usually does with "cursed" items.
• One of the ongoing tensions between different interest groups within D&D centers on the rate of rest and recovery. Having two different levers for this can be a huge boon, as dave2008's BHP and Healing Surges alike both provide. So, imagine that your HP are fully restored with a night's rest, so long as it was truly restful, but you only get back 1d2 surges if it wasn't safe and cozy etc. Sure, you've got most of your mojo, but you're running on empty--you're fatigued, but not suffering a death spiral. Having those two different levers opens up a lot of options for varying how resting works and what impacts it has, potentially allowing more granularity with resting, which seems to be a pretty big OSR-type-fan goal.

There are probably more but I'm tired and really need to head to bed. Point being: having these systems that directly connect together, but still remain separate, really can provide benefits--for people of all sorts of tastes, not just contemporary-design fans.

 

[Bae'zel]

Reading through the Outgunned Action Flicks book on running a Western campaign, I came across rules for running Duels. Basically it was its own system outside of usual combat and the normal way of running opposed skill tests. Spoiler: the loser of a duel loses all HP and is helpless if not dead.

Coupled with the guidance in the new DMG guide about how many of the rules are for combat against GM-run antagonists, it got me thinking about how I will start to change the framing of scenes in RPGs.

Like a show down, or the bad guy points a poisoned hand crossbow at the heroes. By the combat rules, depending character level, such scenes would be laughably meaningless and totally stripped of dramatic tension.

If I frame the scene as “not combat, stakes are higher, if you get hit by that bolt, your 100HP will not count” I may get what I’m looking for (disclaimer about session zero expectations etc etc).

It would go both ways though: if the PCs threaten an antagonist, even though they have 200hp, if the framing of the scene makes this an out of combat dramatic moment, all bets are off.

Not for everyone, but it’s something I’m working on figuring out.