D&D 4E 4e Heal info in new Confessions article

[loseth]

A risk of death means there's a chance that the PC may escape the sorrows and horrors of life.

PC: 'Oh, the angst! The angst! I shall tear out my hair unless I am allowed to die!'

DM: 'NO, nightwalker. You are cursed to wander the realm of the living, forever feeding on the blood of the innocent to satisfy your Dark cravings and...Dave! Stop rolling your eyes! It's Dungeons and Dragons: the Requiem, OK?'

 

[shilsen]

PC: 'Oh, the angst! The angst! I shall tear out my hair unless I am allowed to die!'

DM: 'NO, nightwalker. You are cursed to wander the realm of the living, forever feeding on the blood of the innocent to satisfy your Dark cravings and...Dave! Stop rolling your eyes! It's Dungeons and Dragons: the Requiem, OK?'

Actually, there's no angst among the PCs in my game, but I have had a couple say (IC and OOC) that death would be kinder to them.

To quote Mustrum Ridcully from another thread, the motto of 4e should be: "Prolonged suffering instead of swift death." And I'm all for that.

 

[pemerton]

Then again, I am not playing to play some uber powerful godly invincible character. I am playing simply to see how events unfold and the story that results from it. Characters don't know whether or not they are NPCs and characters die (Boromir, Obi-wan, Sturm Brightblade, Samuel L. Jacksons' character in Deep Blue Sea) . I don't see any reason to assume that my character is any more special than any other character (other than possibly the use of action points which run out), because they are a PC and I control them.

Again, I think there is a confusion here between the metagame and the ingame situation.

In the gameworld, your PC is no more special than any other NPC. All face the same chances of death (eg getting mauled by a dragon will kill anyone).

But at the table you, as player, have the capacity to bring it about that your PC does not get randomly mauled. This is not a fact about the gameworld. It's a fact about your narrative control as a player.

Now, I'm prepared to believe that you don't care to play a game in which you have that sort of narrative control - you'd rather just let the dice unfurl before you and tell you what happens. But (for the reasons that Mourn, if perhaps unnecessarily scornfully, indicated) I think that that is probably a fairly minority position among game players.

 

[Kesh]

While it's nice that Healing has a good use, I'm not sure if I like this 'internal healing reserve' thing. It smells of cheese.

I'm down, basically at death's door, yet I can find the focus to heal myself?

I soooo desperatly want to like 4e, but things like this just turn me off.

I can name at least one movie scene that captures this new rule perfectly:

"My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die!"

 

[The Little Raven]

I can name at least one movie scene that captures this new rule perfectly:

"My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die!"

The book reinforces this, because when he drops to the ground with the dagger in his gut, you are directly told he is dying. He has a little mental episode where his father's ghost and his mentor's ghost berate him for spending his life on vengeance and failing, and that motivates him to overcome his fatal injuries, seal his wound by jamming his hand inside of his stomach and kicking the Six-Fingered Man's ass.

If that's not a death's door second wind, then I don't know what is.

 

[Wolfspider]

[Buffy died]... and was raised. Twice. No real penalty for dying...

No real penalty for dying! You must have seen a different Season Five finale than I did.

 

[BryonD]

That to me is not a good thing. Taking a more gamist approach, imo, is a horrible decision and is ruining the game (my opinion of course).

I am 100% with you.

There are some great examples here of heroic characters coming back from the brink. And a good game should capture that. At the right time.

Coming back from a mortal injury to kick the ass of the six fingered man is a hell of a lot less awesome if you just came back from mortal injury fighting the goblin that just happened to be guarding the door 10 minutes ago. And you also came back from mortal injury when fighting that guard yesterday. And the day before that. Tuesday was good... But Monday you had to come back from the edge of death three times.

Things that are routine are never special and everything seems to be becoming routine.

 

[BryonD]

Because you're not special in real life, and the game should strive to present you with an escape from your mundaneness? Maybe you like playing games just to be unimportant Joe Schmoe, able to choke on a hard biscuit, but most of us play games so we can be something special.

I prefer to play in a game where the real players get a chance to accomplish making their PCs be special. I could simply declare the characters to be the ultimate power badasses of the universe without need to buy any rule sets. There is no accomplishment in foregone conclusions.

 

[The Little Raven]

Things that are routine are never special and everything seems to be becoming routine.

Which is why this whole "fear of death" thing being a "staple of previous editions" strikes me as silly, since including a resurrection ability in a core class since 1st edition made it routine to come back from the dead. That ruins the threat of death far more than the ability to avoid death with certain abilities, since instead of just being able to avoid death, you can invalidate it completely by reversing it.

 

[pemerton]

Coming back from a mortal injury to kick the ass of the six fingered man is a hell of a lot less awesome if you just came back from mortal injury fighting the goblin that just happened to be guarding the door 10 minutes ago. And you also came back from mortal injury when fighting that guard yesterday. And the day before that. Tuesday was good... But Monday you had to come back from the edge of death three times.

Things that are routine are never special and everything seems to be becoming routine.

This post raises a lot of issues about game design and the payoff of play. Just to pick on a few of them.

First, it may well be that something has already gone wrong if fights with goblin door guards are producing mortal injuries. In 4e terms that sounds like a fight with minions, or perhaps with an ordinary brute or soldier. If it's not something more epic than that, the sensible deployment of powers by a player should be enough to make sure nothing mortal comes about.

Second, it seems to be a goal of 4e design to reduce (eliminate?) the sorts of routine encounters that are typical of dungeons in past editions: "no more 10-by-10 rooms with two orcs," W&M p 14. So the fight with the goblin door guard may well have been an epic battle, in which case getting into the room must have been pretty important, in which case a dramatic recovery to complete the job is far from narratively absurd.

Third, every time I go to see a fantasy movie I want dramatic stuff to happen. Why shouldn't it be the same in a fantasy RPG? This notion that I have to work at the game for hours and hours, for sessions and sessions, before I get 6-fingered man style payoff is (IMO) misguided. It doesn't spoil my enjoyment of movies that I see one or two a week and every 2 hours of watching produces multiple dramatic payoffs. Why shouldn't D&D be the same? If combat takes about an hour to resolve (for example) 1 dramatic payoff per player per combat doesn't seem out of the question. I don't see ennui setting in at that point.

Fourth, what sort of rules can reconcile that rate of payoff during play with the plausible ingame evolution of a storylilne about the same group of characters? Drama every day is unrealistic for the PCs (which is quite compatible with drama every session being good for the players). The DMG will therefore need to have (non-simulationist) rules about the passage of time during and between sessions. Presumably it will.