Grog said:
No. You're still thinking in 3E terms.
No, I'm thinking in D&D terms. And I feel as if I'm on solid ground in doing so, because one of the few things we do know is the heart and soul of D&D resources is not going away. I think I got this off on the wrong foot by even mentioning the wizard. I only brought wizarding up, because its something we'd had a hint about. The wizards spells are really tangential to the argument. That he gets to keep the basic blaster function, warlock like, really makes the wizard in 4E little different than a fighter in this regard to resources. So lets simplify this discussion and avoid the distraction of arcane spells, because that's not really what's at stake here.
Imagine the party has no wizard. In fact, lets imagine that the adventuring party has no spell casters. When we talking about spending resources, what primarily are we talking about in 4E or any other addition of D&D?
Hit points. Regardless of how much blaster power the Wizard still retains, if the hit points are waning, its time to go have a nap. All the at will blaster fire in the world doesn't change that. And, as you note, we don't know anything about how hit points are handled as a resource in 4E. Unless they refresh on a per encounter basis (as some have argued that they do in 3E given the prevelence of wands of cure light wounds), your argument that 4E is more friendly to longer dungeon runs has no substantial basis.
A given encounter in 4E could be equally difficult in a relative sense to a similar encounter in 3E, but because of changes in the design paradigm, it doesn't have to push the PCs anywhere near as close to their next rest break as the 3E encounter did.
If it takes the same percentage of hit points away, then it does. And if it doesn't, then its in a very real way not as difficult of an encounter.
The big question in my mind is how they're going to handle healinng.
I think that became the single biggest question out there as soon as they said they were going to an at-will and per encounter model of resources. At will healing breaks central tenents of the game. Per encounter healing, like the 'first aid' of many systems, is more likely, probably in some form like 'bind wounds' that only works once per encounter (this however creates a book keeping nightmare), combined with a small amount of per day miracles.
I'm inclined to think that under the new rules, not all clerics will even have access to healing, but this may just be my confusion over how they can even manage to get traditional D&D healing to work under the new model.
on multiple occasions, but the second the cleric runs out of healing, everything stops.
Exactly.
So, if they want to significantly change the way D&D adventures work, they're going to have to change the way healing resources work, and I'm very curious to see how they're going to do that, because it's going to be a critical design issue.
You are absolutely right. If we could get any one question answered about 4E, this would be the one to have answered.
