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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fanaelialae" data-source="post: 4220107" data-attributes="member: 53980">I can see, in a sense, why you would consider additional hp at level 1 to be kid gloves.  Unlike a rule that prevents crits or causes all arrows to deal 1 damage until level 3, however, extra hp is not obvious and doesn't cause the disjointed sense of disbelief that those other rules would.  It's a matter of consistency.  And since 4e also raises the hp of level 1 monsters to the same level, it's really not kid gloves at all.  It's just eliminating the swingy nature of level 1 combat without the DM having to house rule or fiat a single thing.Let me try to explain this again.  I died in the first round of the first combat of the campaign.1. I roll a low initiative.2. The goblins roll a higher initiative than I do.3. A goblin archer singles me out and crits me with an arrow.4. Max damage is rolled, my wizard dies.I would love an explanation of what I could have done in that scenario to avoid my character dying without DM fiat.  Because if there wasn't anything, then I had 'absolutely' no say in my character's fate.  Had I won initiative, I could have tried casting sleep on the gobs or taken cover.  Instead, I never got to act- I just died.The DM doesn't have to pursue the party til they are dead, but some level of versimilitude is desirable in our campaigns.  Just because the PCs decide to run away doesn't mean the gobs say to themselves, "okay guess those guys we ambushed for their stuff are running away and will never bother us again so we may as well not waste any more arrows on them even though they're running away with all that stuff we ambushed them for in the first place".  No offense, but that's just silly.  It isn't the DM's job to kill the characters but neither is it his job to ensure their survival (because if the DM is unwilling to ever let a character die, then we might as well just narrate combats and save ourselves the rolling; the result is a foregone conclusion- I used to be exactly this sort of DM when I first started out, so I know firsthand- eventually the players figured out that I didn't have the stones to kill them and I had a choice, kill one to disprove that theory, or give up- I chose the former).The extra hp in 4e, coupled with weakened crits and slower scaling of damage, means that even level 1 characters can make a mistake or two and still survive to tell the tale.  Running away is much more feasible if you can take 2 or 3 more hits than if you know, "Crud, running away will provoke an AoO that will render me unconscious if it connects".  I've been there too (terrible luck coupled with a "no one gets left behind" attitude).I never said that we had fought ogres.  You brought up ogres.  Look back to your original response.  For the record, no DM that I've ever played under has had us fight ogres at level 1.  I only mentioned them for illustrative purposes, because you had already brought them up.Rolling max on an arrow renders a wizard unconcious and dying, not dead.  While dying may not be much fun for the duration of the combat (assuming the cleric can't reach you to cast CLW, in which case it was a short interruption) there is the assumption that your companions will heal you up and you can continue the adventure.  At -14, you are dead dead.  No more adventuring for you unless you can afford a raise dead spell, which at that level you can't.  Thankfully, the designers of 4e saw fit to put a few sacred cows up for slaughter with this new edition.  Now, a single arrow will never put any character out of the fight; it takes multiple hits to put you on the ground.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Ummm... no, our rolling out in the open is not something we need to talk to our DM about.  It was something that we decided as a group a good long while back.  It is how we prefer to play.  We have our reasons (I don't want to derail this thread, so I won't go into it).  The problem with implementing extra hp in previous editions was that it made characters more powerful (technically, more durable, but you could take on more creatures than a normal PC and were therefore more powerful).IMO, it is easier to introduce a less powerful level 0 into the game than it is to balance for making characters stronger than the norm at level 1.  There have been a lot of good suggestions in this thread on how to implement level 0 in 4e.  However, if you simply added +20 hp to all level 1 3.x characters, you imbalanced the system in the other direction.  Those characters would ALWAYS have 20 more hp than the system expected them to have (though at higher levels the repercussions of this would become less and less noticable).  If you scale down at level 1 (to create level 0) you affect nothing that has already been established.  If you scale level 1 up, then all of the levels that follow level 1 are also scaled up.I'm sorry that you feel that it is too much.  Have you seen the new monsters, as they have been scaled up as well.  The weakest level 1 (non-minion) kobold has 24 hp.  Characters probably are significantly tougher than farmers, however, if that is your concern.We have give and take with the narrative too.  We just express it differently.  One of the most memorable encounters from a campaign that my DM ran last year was against some sort of air elemental giant.  We faced him in the throne room he had usurped, and an epic melee ensued.  Our characters fought hard and well, but one by one we were felled by his might (the DM had a string of luck).  Finally, it was just him and Drekalina (character of a friend of mine), who was a cowardly hag with a kobold complex (some of the best comic relief we've ever had in a campaign- Drekalina is fondly remembered to this day by my group).  Both were on their last legs.  Drekalina's player looks at our DM and says something like, "seeing the rest of the group is down, Drekalina's terror becomes desperation and she lashes out with everything she's got".  Our DM let her enter barbarian rage, which gave Drekalina just enough oomph to finish off the boss before collapsing unconscious.  Never again did Drekalina gain the rage bonus, but that one time was enough.  It made for a truly unforgettable encounter, and the DM didn't fudge a single roll.Drekalina was actually a really good example of a character who I would consider a bildungsroman style character, though it was really more due to how her player roleplayed her than any mechanical property.  She started out as an ignorant hag who was under the delusion that she was a kobold and ran away to hide from even the most insignificant threats.  She ended the campaign having significantly matured and overcome her delusions, and going toe to toe with an entity that devoured entire planets.I'm not saying that your style is badwrongfun by any means.  Just that our playstyle suits my group well, and that 4e looks like it will suit our playstyle better than any previous edition.House rules are often a pain because they can introduce unintended resultant effects.  We use quite a few of them in our 3.5 games, but they've resulted from years of finageling the system to work more closely to what we want.  Expecting newb DMs to create house rules is just asking for something to go wrong, IMO.</blockquote>

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