D&D General 4e Healing was the best D&D healing

[Fanaelialae]

There are a number of variables involved, but twelve damage is quite a bit, and is absolutely guaranteed to kill a first level rogue outright. If an attack deals much less than that, then it probably wasn't a direct hit, so we can't make any assertions about its likelihood to penetrate any type of armor.

Unless you're talking about later editions, of course, where words no longer mean anything.

A greataxe is not a subtle weapon. And leather armor is not likely to stop it. It's even less likely to do much against a maul. This is irrespective of edition.

Besides which, 12 damage is not guaranteed to kill a second level rogue with even just an above average Constitution. I can't recall the last time I saw a second level rogue with magical armor though. It certainly doesn't seem to me like a given.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Besides which, 12 damage is not guaranteed to kill a second level rogue with even just an above average Constitution. I can't recall the last time I saw a second level rogue with magical armor though. It certainly doesn't seem to me like a given.

A level 2 thief with significantly above-average Constitution will average 11hp. Even if they rolled significantly above-average for their HP on top of their significantly above-average Con, and got their maximum HP up to 13; if they take 12 damage from a hit, then they're going to have a lot bigger problems to worry about than whether their accuracy with their dagger is 65 percent or 55 percent. Accounting for such a penalty is unlikely to improve the integrity of our model to a significant degree.

Even for this specific corner-case scenario, with one particular class of one particular level and one particular armor type, going against an opponent with a very specific weapon who happens to roll a specific damage range for their attack; imposing a mechanical penalty doesn't really add anything to the model. It's just inefficient. It's certainly not worth throwing out the representational nature of the model, or claiming it as proof that a hit isn't even a hit.

 

[Fanaelialae]

A level 2 thief with significantly above-average Constitution will average 11hp. Even if they rolled significantly above-average for their HP on top of their significantly above-average Con, and got their maximum HP up to 13; if they take 12 damage from a hit, then they're going to have a lot bigger problems to worry about than whether their accuracy with their dagger is 65 percent or 55 percent. Accounting for such a penalty is unlikely to improve the integrity of our model to a significant degree.

Even for this specific corner-case scenario, with one particular class of one particular level and one particular armor type, going against an opponent with a very specific weapon who happens to roll a specific damage range for their attack; imposing a mechanical penalty doesn't really add anything to the model. It's just inefficient. It's certainly not worth throwing out the representational nature of the model, or claiming it as proof that a hit isn't even a hit.

So use a third or fourth level rogue. Most rogues that I've seen didn't have magic armor, and I certainly don't think it can be taken for granted that you have magic armor at those levels.

You've claimed that a big issue you have with the fast healing model is that there is little to no difference between a hit and a miss at a narrative level.

You've also stated that armor, particularly magic armor, should be assumed to be representative of hit points at higher levels.

I see a contradiction therein. Armor boosts your AC. Armor class, in turn, determines whether an attack hits or misses you. The armor can be assumed to protect the user on a miss, turning the blow of the attack or some such. However, if the armor also protects the user on a hit (because hit points are armor), then there is effectively no difference in the narrative.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I see a contradiction therein. Armor boosts your AC. Armor class, in turn, determines whether an attack hits or misses you. The armor can be assumed to protect the user on a miss, turning the blow of the attack or some such. However, if the armor also protects the user on a hit (because hit points are armor), then there is effectively no difference in the narrative.

Not at all. Being hit in such a way that you suffer any amount of physical injury (however slight, or not) is entirely distinct from being hit in such a way that you do not suffer any amount of physical injury; because the injury is a significant part of the narrative. That's the important part of the model, that we're actually rolling in order to find out: whether or not any amount of injury occurred. Swinging your sword and hurting the enemy (to any degree) is satisfying.

Contrast that with the alternative, where both a hit and a miss equate to a miss within the narrative, and the only difference is with less-tangible aspects such as luck and stamina. Those are not important things that are worth modeling. Swinging your sword and making your enemy slightly tired is not satisfying.

And even from an RP standpoint, why would anyone care if they're slightly tired, when they'll be good as new after a nap? Why would anyone spend a pound of gold on a "healing potion" if its effects are significantly less impressive than taking a nap? What kind of weak-sauce "magic" is that? It's just highly unsatisfying at every possible level.

 

[NotAYakk]

People buy red bull.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Did you feel that 13th Age had mechanics that are separate from roleplaying? My group found just the opposite...

The fighter's "roll to hit before you find out what sort of attack you tried to make" is a sticking point for me.

Is it, though? Adventurers may be on the receiving end of deadlier weapons than fists, but they also tend to be substantially better armored. An ogre swinging a club at a knight in plate armor isn't that different from a professional boxer punching someone without armor.

Punching someone with your fists wrapped in leather and padding isn't that different from punching a target who is wrapped in leather and padding. Boxers are attacked by weapons that are less deadly per attack than normal fists. The difference is that under the AD&D model the wrapped fists have a 100% chance of protecting their target; the D&D armour model, being binary, means that the hits that land are the ones targeted to bypass the armour.

So for a more level appropriate level we've got an ogre swinging a greatclub at someone in "chainmail" over padding (chain chosen because it prevents almost all cutting but does little to mitigate blunt force trauma because it's flexible - and a common armour type). The ogre from memory is effectively strength 18/00 so we're putting our PC into the ring against Mike Tyson in his prime (I don't want to get into the argument that Tyson never had a prime). Then we're first giving the target a chin that's not protected by armour, second giving Tyson even more protection for his hands by giving him a weapon, and third giving Mike Tyson a force multiplier (based on the length of the greatclub) - and a weapon that's significantly tougher than a human rib cage.

So how many full force blows do you think an athletic human who isn't at the absolute peak of what a human could take physically could take at twice the power Iron Mike dished out in his prime? Because my guess is that the first body-shot would break ribs (recovery time: 6 weeks to 6 months)

 

[Fanaelialae]

Not at all. Being hit in such a way that you suffer any amount of physical injury (however slight, or not) is entirely distinct from being hit in such a way that you do not suffer any amount of physical injury; because the injury is a significant part of the narrative. That's the important part of the model, that we're actually rolling in order to find out: whether or not any amount of injury occurred. Swinging your sword and hurting the enemy (to any degree) is satisfying.

Contrast that with the alternative, where both a hit and a miss equate to a miss within the narrative, and the only difference is with less-tangible aspects such as luck and stamina. Those are not important things that are worth modeling. Swinging your sword and making your enemy slightly tired is not satisfying.

And even from an RP standpoint, why would anyone care if they're slightly tired, when they'll be good as new after a nap? Why would anyone spend a pound of gold on a "healing potion" if its effects are significantly less impressive than taking a nap? What kind of weak-sauce "magic" is that? It's just highly unsatisfying at every possible level.

I studied martial arts for several years when I was younger. There's a big difference between an attack that is effortlessly avoided, versus a strike that you avoided by only the narrowest of margins. The former doesn't merit a second thought, while the latter can be exhausting. I experienced such on many occasions, while training against talented people whose skills far surpassed my own. I would start the fight full of vigor and ready to win, but it wouldn't be long before I was panting for breath, and it would be all I could do just to defend myself.

By default, we're not rolling to see if injury occurred. That's just your chosen interpretation. We're rolling to see whether the target lost hit points, the description of which is open to many different interpretations.

Your enemy barely deflecting your deadly thrust in time, their breath coming in shorter gasps, is not satisfying? I disagree. I think that a description that indicates progress towards victory is what determines how satisfactory it is. I mean sure, if you just described both as "you miss" then that would be unsatisfactory, but even a rookie DM would have more sense than to describe every attack that way.

The reason a person would care about healing potions is because they work quickly, such as during battle. Taking a nap in the middle of combat doesn't generally work out as well. As I see it, not needing to stockpile healing potions for use outside combat is a feature rather than a bug.

 

[Neonchameleon]

A hit can be substantive without being obviously fatal. Most hits should fall into that category, where it's unlikely to kill anyone outright, but enough of them will kill anyone.

A substantive hit with a maul might not kill someone - but it will break limbs or ribs and out the target out of action. A hit by a cutting weapon into metal armour that actually takes effect (which it mostly does by avoiding the metal parts) is likely to at the very least mangle whatever it hits, cutting right to the bone and probably breaking that.

And yes people can survive arms that are simultaneously broken and mangled (which is what a substantive hit does) - but they don't survive unweakened and they are pretty much out of the fight.

Remember: in AD&D one in five first level fighters is capable of standing up to the best possible hit by an orc with an axe without substantive penalty.

If a professional boxer goes a few rounds with another professional boxer of equal competence, should they then be easy pickings for an amateur boxer in a subsequent match? If the only way of modeling the advantage of the fresh amateur is that the worn expert takes fewer hits to knock out, but the pro is still more likely to land hits on the amateur than the other way around, then that's perfectly reasonable (to me) given the limited nature of the model.

That depends how close the fight was and how much time the professional has had to recover.

If you're one of the untiring robots of AD&D the only advantage the amateur has is that it will take fewer hits for the amateur to drop the tired professional. And the professional is going to take exactly as long to drop the amateur regardless of how much of a battering they have taken. And give them a full night of bed rest and they are going to be almost exactly as hard for the amateur as they were the second they left the ring against the other professional.

If you're using a D&D that is actually on something approaching terms with the real world (i.e. 4e or 5e) rather than running on pure genre convention the way AD&D does then it matters whether the fighter has had time to take a short rest.

If the amateur jumps into the ring immediately after the previous professional fighter goes down they've got a chance. The battered professional is tired and will have spent all their encounter and daily powers in 4e - and will have spent their action surge and second wind in 5e

Meanwhile if the professional has had time to rest and recover they are going to have had time to spend hit dice/healing surges, and they are going to have recovered their second wind (both editions) and either their action surge or their encounter powers. They aren't at full capacity yet - but having been given time to recover most of their offense and at least some of their endurance is back even if they have a lot less in the tank long term. This is very bad for the amateur. And woe beide the amateur who gives the supposedly tired professional a full night to rest up. This to me feels about right.

If on the other hand it's just been a few rounds of exhibition match the amateur is going to get mauled whatever.

The thing you miss is that it's not the case that "the only way of modeling the advantage of the fresh amateur is that the worn expert takes fewer hits to knock out, but the pro is still more likely to land hits on the amateur than the other way around" We know it's not the case because the two most recent editions of D&D demonstrate that it's not the case. 4e and 5e alike use substantially better models than this that account for fatigue lowering offence as well as defence. They don't sacrifice almost all realism in the name of simplicity (and then mess that simplicity up with useless attack matrices or THAC0).

But the simplicity of AD&D's combat mechanics becomes particularly ironic given the fiddly spellcasting rules, with a particular irony coming with just how fiddly the iconic Fireball spell is in AD&D, covering an area [sic] of 33,000 cubic feet. Utterly unrealistic almost untiring fighters with video-gamey health bars and mashing A to attack alongside video-gamey spell lists where you want a computer to calculate the effects of a fireball is a design decision. And it's one that says that the rules are mostly for spellcasting.

By default, we're not rolling to see if injury occurred. That's just your chosen interpretation. We're rolling to see whether the target lost hit points, the description of which is open to many different interpretations.

Your enemy barely deflecting your deadly thrust in time, their breath coming in shorter gasps, is not satisfying? I disagree. I think that a description that indicates progress towards victory is what determines how satisfactory it is. I mean sure, if you just described both as "you miss" then that would be unsatisfactory, but even a rookie DM would have more sense than to describe every attack that way.

The reason a person would care about healing potions is because they work quickly, such as during battle. Taking a nap in the middle of combat doesn't generally work out as well. As I see it, not needing to stockpile healing potions for use outside combat is a feature rather than a bug.

To be fair this is the best way of squaring the real world with AD&D - but it doesn't do a good job guiding you to that.

 

[Fanaelialae]

To be fair this is the best way of squaring the real world with AD&D - but it doesn't do a good job guiding you to that.

Right, under the slow healing model of AD&D you need injuries. It doesn't really make any kind of sense that it would take weeks for a high level character to recover their stamina and whatnot.

However, even with injuries, that model falls apart under scrutiny. Either injuries are superficial (in which case one wonders why they take an accomplished hero weeks to recover from), or they are substantive (in which case one wonders why such serious injuries do nothing to hamper the hero). As I see it, even with injuries it doesn't produce reasonable outcomes.

Regarding my own experiences with AD&D, the slow healing rules were typically little more than an afterthought. In almost every campaign I can think of, we had a cleric whose job it was to render natural healing moot.

The only campaign I can recall where we didn't have a cleric was one where priest classes were banned. However, that campaign had a lot of house rules that allowed for non-magical healing, such as first aid and the application of balms. Even then, the pacing of encounters was much slower than in a typical AD&D campaign.

IMO, the real reason AD&D worked (in this regard) was because magic was used to patch the hole. People rarely relied on the natural healing rules (IME) so the unreasonable outcomes it lead to were fairly easy to overlook.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

So for a more level appropriate level we've got an ogre swinging a greatclub at someone in "chainmail" over padding (chain chosen because it prevents almost all cutting but does little to mitigate blunt force trauma because it's flexible - and a common armour type).

Again, a cherry-picked example to cast the model in the worst possible light. The model isn't specifically designed to cover that specific scenario, though. Detailing every possible interaction would be boring and tedious, for very little benefit. Instead, we have a streamlined model that works in the vast majority of cases, with a minimum of fuss. (And which suffers from a couple of nit-picky corner-case problems, if you really want to obsess over minutiae.)

A substantive hit with a maul might not kill someone - but it will break limbs or ribs and out the target out of action. A hit by a cutting weapon into metal armour that actually takes effect (which it mostly does by avoiding the metal parts) is likely to at the very least mangle whatever it hits, cutting right to the bone and probably breaking that.

We're not trying to model a substantive hit with an edged weapon that bypasses armor, though. Getting hit by an axe, with no armor (or other factors, like magic) to mitigate it, cannot reasonably result in anything other than serious injury. It's only the existence of armor (or magic) which provides the necessary room for reasonable doubt.

If you're one of the untiring robots of AD&D the only advantage the amateur has is that it will take fewer hits for the amateur to drop the tired professional. And the professional is going to take exactly as long to drop the amateur regardless of how much of a battering they have taken.

And what's wrong with that model? It will get us to the same end-point, either way, but with significantly less math required. One of the major reasons why death spirals are pointless is because they tend to cancel each other out, as often as not. Even if we were modeling pain and bruises and slowed reaction times, the pro is going to even that out as soon as they get a good hit in.

Meanwhile if the professional has had time to rest and recover they are going to have had time to spend hit dice/healing surges, and they are going to have recovered their second wind (both editions) and either their action surge or their encounter powers. They aren't at full capacity yet - but having been given time to recover most of their offense and at least some of their endurance is back even if they have a lot less in the tank long term.

Aside from Daily powers, a fighter who spends hit dice or healing surges to recover is operating at full capacity for the duration of the second fight. Everything that happened to them as a result of the first fight is wiped clean. It doesn't matter whether they were literally one good hit away from unconsciousness, because five minutes (or an hour) later, they may as well have been resting in Tahiti for three months. And that completely trivializes the fact that they were hit in the first place. Once those HP are back, the fact that they were ever gone is entirely irrelevant. (It might theoretically matter around the fourth fight of the same day, or the next morning after six fights in one day, but it's entirely irrelevant now; and it will only ever become relevant for five minutes at the end of the day.)

The fundamental problem underlying this whole debate is that it's all-or-nothing. Each edition only has one set of rules for healing, without regard for the circumstances in which the HP were lost. If (for the sake of argument) we take for granted that HP totals include both physical toughness, as well as fatigue and other factors; then a rule that makes sense in the context of a physical hit does not make sense in the context of a near miss, and vice versa.

The only way to make sense of the unified healing rules it is to go with one extreme or the other - either every hit is physical or none of them are. Either a tough-enough warrior can take quite a number of substantive physical hits before falling, or nobody can stay up through any number of substantive physical hits regardless of how tough they're supposed to be.

And while it's possible to have a serious world where a number of specific heroes are effectively Made of Iron, it is not really possible to take a world seriously when every single person living there is Made of Plasticine.