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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Marandahir" data-source="post: 8036601" data-attributes="member: 6803643">Speaking to MoonSong's complaint, during most of 4e, 90% of the character class features revolved around combat. Utility powers are rare, and encounter or at-will daily utilities were nearly unheard of. The game was balanced around the combat encounter, which meant adding damage to Bards' spells where it didn't necessarily make sense, or requiring the bard to shoot an enemy with an arrow before they could buff or heal an ally outside of their limited Majestic Word usages. More out-of-combat features did come eventually, especially with Essentials, but 4e as it was originally designed felt built for the miniatures game, and earned that description. The balance on healing was a big part of that, but so was language like hit or miss or damage. The philosophy of what HP means wasn't quite locked down, which meant that the game was designed by different folks at WotC inconsistently on this factor. I love the healing surge idea. Honestly, I'd love to see a mechanic like healing/stamina mixture where you might draw upon these reserves to perform certain types of physical actions like bull rushes or grapples, and do away with HP=vitality entirely. Maybe even disentangle morale from stamina. The key take away should be that characters are not meat-bags to be sliced and diced over and over again before they die; a "hit" means your morale and/or stamina is weaker because of how hard it was to dodge that attack. But this doesn't play well with lasting effects, like charms, or illusions or ongoing fire damage. Am I on fire from the fireball? Shouldn't I be burning alive? Or is the fire ball overheating me but I managed to avoid it but now I'm more tired because of the heat?5e still has some of these problems, and I feel strongly that D&D needs to hash out a solution to them.</blockquote>

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