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

[haakon1]

3. realize that one might have a better experience talking about one's preferred game in a thread or forum intended for discussion about that game

That doesn’t actually work.

 

[haakon1]

Let's flip this around, though. Do people who play 5.5e go into the Pathfinder forum or the 4e Forum, games they perhaps don't play and perhaps don't even enjoy, to discuss topics which maybe possibly could relate to some other game? I couldn't actually tell you as I certainly don't have the time to go into other fora to try to discover some interesting topic that may or may not have been mistagged nor do I wish to take part in a discussion that is presumably about a game I don't play and perhaps a game I even dislike.

5e partisans complaining about other editions and those who play them is common on ENworld.

One of the most popular threads, after all, is complaining about the “conservativism” of D&D players. I got helpfully suggested to go there when I said that one alternative to houseruling 5e to get 1e feel would be to play actual AD&D, it still works.

5e partisanship isn’t confined to threads with the D&D (5e) tags, and many 5e tagged posts are about General FRPG topics.

If you don’t agree “most recent from WotC is automatically the best and everything before 2024 is trash and so offensive it needs content warnings”, ENworld is sometimes frustrating.

 

[dave2008]

I will try to explain, but I am don't know that I have the ability to clearly and fully do so. I know I can't explain my point as thoroughly as you do yours!

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.

I can't speak for other systems or how other people use them. I have never played in a system the had separate pools for wounds and vitality. Though we had heard of them, we just made a system that works for us. I say this just to let you know I am not speaking about other systems or other viewpoints or other experiences with VP & WP (HP & BHP), just our own.
For us HP are:
An abstraction of a creature's luck, divine favor, stamina, ability to take minor physical injury, and mostly skill. You get more HP as you level primarily because you are more skilled at avoiding serious injury. For us healing surges (we use HD now) are, in large part, the stamina portion of that formula.

So for us, HP is not simply luck points. HP is a creatures ability to avoid serious injury. This can be physical (thick skin), celestial (a god's favor), stamina (attrition, recovery, etc.), or skill (combat/adventure training aka levels).

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.

To be honest we hardly ever come across magic healing. My group has no magic using healers (the only magic user we have is a Wizard). So most of our HP healing is through spending HD or rest, and healer's kit, medicine checks, and rest for BHP. Sometimes I may throw them a potion or too. We play in a low magic setting.

So I don't really care if magic makes it easy to heal. That is the point of magic IMO: make difficult/impossible things easy/possible. If a cleric is using a bunch of spells to heal the party, that is working as intended IMO. I don't understand why this would heaving be an issue.

OH, I did forget that magic healing requires you to spend your (the recipient) HD. I took that idea from 4e. Like I said, we rarely come across magic healing!

This might be a good time to explain that PCs can spend HD on a lot of things. Here is a snip of our basic HD rules, though we make things up as we go along too:

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?

It is the only track of death in our game. 0 HP has no mechanical effect except you gain 1 level of exhaustion and any future damage goes to your BHP (until you recover some HP).

 

[dave2008]

• 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.

This is the disconnect for me and your idea that healing surges (HS) are "wound points." Physical attacks in 4e almost never caused you to loose HS. If a dragon bites you it takes your HP not your HS. You can replenish your HP with HS, but that strikes me as vitality, not wounds. At least that is the way I looked at when I played 4e.

Of course, it is all an abstraction for the benefit of playing a game so we can justify it however we want for ourselves.

 

[SteveC]

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.

This exactly! It's a longer term resource that you track and gradually expend throughout the adventuing day. It's also something the DM can use to show how a situation drains the party's ability to keep going. The idea in 4E was pretty much that you'd always go into combat at full HP, but you'd still have a limit as to how much you could actually do in a day.

I play PF2, and with the healing rules there, the group effectively always starts at full HP, but there's no restriction other than time. I don't think that's necessarily a good feature, since the only thing that you gradually lose over the day is spell slots at this point, and a martial party doesn't really care about them. Perhaps that's operating as expected.

5E Hit Dice are intended to serve the purpose of allowing characters to push on but capping what can be done in a single day, combined with short rest abilities. The only problem is that with the 1 hour rest time, groups (and I'm speaking from what I both read and experience here) don't always engage with the short rest mechanic due to the feeling of losing time. I find that restricts characters who are short rest based for their resources, so I usually recommend reducing the time or just having a number of short rests that the group can just take ... but my group doesn't do that. It means I play characters with long rest recoveries or just ignore the spell slots for my Hexblade dip bard.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think there's absolutely a difference between two tracks of damage points, one that you automatically proceed into if the first is exhausted, and two elements, one that you have to (at least as a player) actively choose to use to replenish the other. They perhaps aren't entirely distinct, but they don't seem to automatically serve the same purpose, either.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I play PF2, and with the healing rules there, the group effectively always starts at full HP, but there's no restriction other than time. I don't think that's necessarily a good feature, since the only thing that you gradually lose over the day is spell slots at this point, and a martial party doesn't really care about them. Perhaps that's operating as expected.

As best I can tell, minimizing non-tactical injury is working as intended there. Its certainly a different paradigm than the traditional D&D in that regard, but I don't expect that was an element they wanted to keep.

 

[Voadam]

This is the disconnect for me and your idea that healing surges (HS) are "wound points." Physical attacks in 4e almost never caused you to loose HS. If a dragon bites you it takes your HP not your HS. You can replenish your HP with HS, but that strikes me as vitality, not wounds. At least that is the way I looked at when I played 4e.

Of course, it is all an abstraction for the benefit of playing a game so we can justify it however we want for ourselves.

My memory was that only certain undead in 4e drained healing surges, replacing the old energy drain. It seemed a decent mechanic to me on paper and felt narratively right, though I do not remember actually encountering it in play in my 4e games.

Healing surges are narratively used to heal and rally, which I agree is narratively different from representing wounds. You can be bloodied or die while still having a full tank of healing surges.

 

[TwoSix]

If you don’t agree “most recent from WotC is automatically the best and everything before 2024 is trash and so offensive it needs content warnings”, ENworld is sometimes frustrating.

I just tend to avoid 5.5 threads. I'll check back in when WotC decides not to waste page count on reprints of subclasses that I already have.

 

[dave2008]

...and everything before 2024 is trash and so offensive it needs content warnings”, ENworld is sometimes frustrating.

Does anyone believe this? I have never seen that opinion shared on these forums. I see a lot of "don't yuck on my yum" type comments, but that is very different in nature and intent.