D&D 5E 5e, Heal Thyself! Is Healing Too Weak in D&D?

[GMforPowergamers]

We need t-shirts that say "I believe in Firecube Supremacy"

i would buy one

 

[Manbearcat]

Ah, so you do not care how many hitpoints the orcs actually might have or how much damage a fireball actually does or if the orcs manage to save or not, so it's like all of these orcs just really have 1 hitpoint. That's a cool idea, makes things very fast, shame it's never been done before.

Yeah. Not only is that basically using Minions exactly...but talk about fiat and completely unrewarding strategic/tactical play.

Player: "I want to do a cool Fireball thing and get as many orcs as I can."

GM: "Ok, no problem, you do the best thing with your Fireball and arbitarily get x number of orcs because its cinematic and waaaaaaay quicker!"

Player: "Uh, but can I play my PC? Can I make the decisions for my character? Can our success stand or fall on my own good play or misplay when (a) deciding to deploy Fireball or not given the orientation of monsters/battlefield and (b) if I do decide to deploy Fireball where to actually deploy it?"

GM: "NAH! You don't need to play your PC. I'll play it for you! Cinematic and waaaaaaaaaaaaaay quicker and I can basically use Minion rules and pretend that I'm not doing exactly that and then go tell people that Minion rules are trash!"

 

[GMforPowergamers]

These conversations are never going to get anywhere until we can all agree on the following:

* HP are not meat.

* Position is not a fixed thing in combat

* Attack rolls are not singular instantiations of a single attack

* Same goes for AC and Defenses and anything of the like. They're all constructs.

this is the most direct way I have ever seen it written but it is how we played in 94/95 and how we play today.
Maybe 4e just catered to the way I ALWAYS played D&D

HP and Position and Attacks and Defenses are all just basically gamist constructs meant to resolve gamestate collisions

even more direct.... I like it

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Yeah. Not only is that basically using Minions exactly...but talk about fiat and completely unrewarding strategic/tactical play.

Player: "I want to do a cool Fireball thing and get as many orcs as I can."

GM: "Ok, no problem, you do the best thing with your Fireball and arbitarily get x number of orcs because its cinematic and waaaaaaay quicker!"

Player: "Uh, but can I play my PC? Can I make the decisions for my character? Can our success stand or fall on my own good play or misplay when (a) deciding to deploy Fireball or not given the orientation of monsters/battlefield and (b) if I do decide to deploy Fireball where to actually deploy it?"

GM: "NAH! You don't need to play your PC. I'll play it for you! Cinematic and waaaaaaaaaaaaaay quicker and I can basically use Minion rules and pretend that I'm not doing exactly that and then go tell people that Minion rules are trash!"

funny thing is back pre me buying minis in 2005ish (I was late to the mini game) most of us would at best make little notes with dots on it... so VERY often we had different images in our minds eye (not very but at least slightly different) and as such the qustion of "How many enemies can I hit with X spell without hitting an ally" was often up to the DM.

Now we had DM/Players that drew out more details, and even used minis from time to time... but we were into 3.5 before it was regular. by the time 4e was announced we rarely used only minds eye theater

 

[Ovinomancer]

Spoiler: PHB195/196 shove

Using the Attack action, you can make a special melee attack to shove a creature, either to knock it prone or push it away from you. If you’re able to make multiple attacks with the Attack action, this attack replaces one of them.
The target of your shove must be no m ore than one size larger than you, and it must be within your reach. You make a Strength (Athletics) check contested by the target’s Strength (Athletics) or Dexterity (Acrobatics) check (the target chooses the ability to use). If you win the contest, you either knock the target prone or push it 5 feet away from you.

That fills in for the how to knock prone other than using the same check a second time with grapple to prone instead of shoving, but it still needs a second ~15 to successfully shove them down before the other gnolls start maybe being a threat if they can roll 17+ with advantage in large numbers to make that beefy 1d8+2 (avg 6.5) add up. even a 10 con wizard at level 11 is going to have 44hp & need to get hit six or seven times before they care, a 21ac character is almost certainly not going to be a ten con wizard & can be expected to have significantly more HP.

Did we really need BA to make ten con wizards fear gaggles of low CR monsters? I can't speak for 4e but don't recall many wizards of any non-gish level who couldn't be made to feel mortal terror just by having a skeleton/zombie/etc move towards them in past editions.

Oh, yeah, not arguing about the efficacy of the tactics, just pointing out how the effect can work through a combination of things.

I like using grapple tactics for the 0 movement effect. Lots of times that can be really effective, even when low chance of success. If that zombie trying to grapple you will mean that you can't run away from the skeletal ogre and you're a squishy, then the calculus on the zombie being not much of an individual threat due to damage output changes radically. This example is from a game I ran in 5e, which featured hordes of zombies with sprinkles of worse things. Zombies grappled often because it was thematic and also mean that reduced mobility lead to the party getting separated tactically, which really ramped up danger as support faltered. If you can isolate 5e PCs from the party, even temporarily, so that they don't have that power multiplier of close PC support, the danger ramps up radically. Heck, one of the most horrifying monsters in my arsenal is one that's smart enough to close a door. If they can drop a bar, they're horrifying squared.

Grappling, even at 10%, can have far reaching impacts on the tactical situation and play, even if a successful grapple never lands. It's situational, though.

 

[Ovinomancer]

These conversations are never going to get anywhere until we can all agree on the following:

* HP are not meat. They cannot be. They may be in small part meat in very, very particular and infrequent circumstances...but they're virtually never meat in any part.

* Position is not a fixed thing in combat and so it cannot possibly be a fixed thing in D&D whether you're playing on a grid or TotM. If you've never been in an actual fight, never seen an actual fight, never been involved in combat sports, then let me disabuse you of your notion that martial artists are statically stuck in the same spot over even the smallest fraction of time (not even a second, let alone 6 solid seconds!). They're circling left, circling right, advancing, retreating, feinting w/ attacks which involve all manner of movement and every appendage and their head, leaping. Same goes for D&D. If you're interpreting your PC standing next to a monster for 6 seconds as static, rock-em-sock-em robots...with respect, your fiction is utter nonsense.

Play the game with fixed position and in fixed intervals of 6 seconds. But imagine stuff that makes actual sense and map it as best you can to the suite of resources being deployed by the participants of the combat.

* Attack rolls are not singular instantiations of a single attack for the overwhelming % of play particularly for martial exchanges. If you've never been in an actual fight, never seen an actual fight, never been involved in combat sports, then let me disabuse you of your notion that martial artists engage in exchanges that are reliable in their frequency (eg I attack you 1/2/3 times every 6 seconds!...all the time...forever!). Exchanges happen with crazy suddeness and intentional lack of frequency (because human operating systems are pattern-finding machines and the last thing you want as a martial artist is to have "your puzzle solved"). In one 6 second interval, you might throw 10 strikes including a double leg takedown attempt and including a few more feints to detect patterns or create openings. The next 6 seconds you may through nothing (merely circling or advancing and retreating). The next 6 seconds may be more of the same or less of the same. Totally infrequent. Any attack matrix is utter nonsense. It is a complete gamist construct meant exclusively to facilitate functional play. If you are perceiving an attack matrix as process simulation...with respect, your fiction is utter nonsense.

Play the game with fixed attack frequency/numbers and in fixed intervals of 6 seconds. But imagine stuff that makes actual sense and map it as best you can to the suite of resources being deployed by the participants of the combat.

* Same goes for AC and Defenses and anything of the like. They're all constructs. They make no sense whatsoever under scrutiny (neither quantitatively nor qualitatively) given what happens in actual fights/martial combat. They're the other end of the game construct equation to resolve collisions in the gamestate. If you're looking at them through a lens of process simulation...that is on you. As is either (a) course correcting or (b) admitting that you're attempting to look at gaming constructs meant to resolve gamestate collisions as something even close to approaching a 1:1 relationship with a shared fiction that makes any sense whatsoever within the framework of what actual martial combat entails (including how the OODA Loop of each participant manifests and resolves) and what it looks like to participants and onlookers alike.

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So yeah. If HP and Position and Attacks and Defenses are all just basically gamist constructs meant to resolve gamestate collisions...then the shared imagined space is pretty well up for grabs.

Ravenous Abyssal Ghouls advance with deranged hunger and speed and implacability and randomness with claws and jaws and spittle which you have to keep away from your flesh and your eyes. If all you're doing is spending your gas tank and its costing you because you're heart rate is increased dramatically and you're dealing with an adrenaline dump and your muscles are tiring...then yeah, the 5 HP aura is just exhaustion damage which makes you less capable of maintaining for an extended duration.

Or you recoil because of the impact to your creed/alignment or your deity recoils at this abomination and, because they work through you, you feel it; 5 HP damage.

Or any other genre appropriate explanation for interpreting the completely nonsensical gamist constructs colliding in D&D gamestate space (regardless of edition...and by the way, D&D 4e's forced movement + movement + marking/OA attack + interrupt system + at-will/encounter model is the first D&D game engine that remotely actually felt anything even approaching what it felt like to assume the OODA Loop of an actual martial artist...in a fight or a grappling match) which you then have to map onto the shared imagined space.

You seem bad at humor. This is probably wrong because you do not get the joke. The joke is "firecubes." It is very funny, and means that hitpoints are meat.

 

[Eric V]

Oh, yes, "but they said it first." Even if your assertion is correct, which I highly doubt it was anything like this, this doesn't mean it's free game to fire back by just trashing other games and expect to be absolved of having that pointed out.

So...I can't be sure he's referring to me, but in post #236, I asked "Are there really 'minions' in 5e though? Monsters you can drop with one hit?

I didn't say anything about 5e sucking or what-have-you; I asked if 5e had a particular mechanic. And then a flurry of, frankly, bizarre responses.

 

[Voadam]

Firecubes are fantastic. Easy to apply on the grid so combat goes quicker and smoother and the disconnect of grid cube to description sphere shows that magic is non-Euclidean. One of the best demonstrations of the Mythos in D&D.

 

[Manbearcat]

Question: "How does 4e handle mass combat with droves of enemy units?"

Answer: "Swarms (which are vulnerable to AoE...like hordes or formations of enemies) w/ auras + Swarms breaking into Minions upon being Bloodied + Artillery (Minions or Standards) protected via terrain and positioning and cover + Terrain features that can be used against the Swarms/Minions and the Swarms/Minions can use against you. Players have to figure out what/when/how to prioritize; find a way to assault the Artillery position as they rain hell down upon you and put you in undesirable spots (eg via Forced Movement riders + terrain interactions) or deal with the "kill-box dynamics" as you try to break the horde that is covered by the position-protected Artillery...or manage both somehow."

Question: "How does 4e handle the trope of a giant monster with multiple tentacles?"

Answer: "Solo/Elite Creature w/ Minions expressing the 6-8 (or whatever) tentacles where players have to decide whether to attack/destroy the dangerous tentacle (Minions) or destroy the body. This works particularly well with a battlefield array that the giant tentacle monster (or whatever) can take advantage of which the players have to carefully navigate (like water + sea monster + boat w/ cover and stuff to stunt with like masts and rigging et al + tentacle Forced Movement and Grappling attacks to toss PCs into the water and drown them).

Question: "How does 4e handle the trope of escorting/protecting vulnerable NPCs?"

Answer: "The NPC is a Minion w/ an Encounter power that lets them outright avoid an attack (so basically a "double hit Minion" + a Trait that gives them a Defense bonus if they're adjacent to an ally (eg hiding behind the ally in fear/terror) + an At-Will that doesn't do damage but lets them move w/o OA and gives them + Defense. That + an NPC Soldier with a suite of abilities to protect/sacrifice themselves (eg like a parent and their child) + PC Defender abilities/Control abilities/immediate interrupts to take attacks in the stead of an ally."

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Just deftly using those 3 above in varying configurations opens up an enormous amount of trope-space in 4e that simultaneously feels genre appropriate and urgent + rewarding tactically (in that you're assuming a pretty intricate and demanding OODA Loop to ensure things go well).

4e's trope-capability is massive in both the fiction it allows for and how tactically and thematically rewarding it is to engage with trying to resolve that fiction using your suite of tactical and thematic resources (Fighters wading into hordes while Wizards and Rangers and Rogues work their way to deal with protected Artillery...Paladins protecting the helpless/vulnerable with their valor/prowess and divine-patronage while Rangers defly avoiding tentacles, firing off cover fire, and dispatching the tentacles with a barrage of arrows while everyone tries not to get thrown into the water and drowned...etc etc).

 

[pemerton]

in 4e, a wizard of sufficiently high level won't ever be facing vanilla orc minions, so this is entirely moot -- you cannot compare. If you do make this encounter in 4e, you're doing very odd things and the orcs won't even be able to hurt the PCs. For example, the Orc Drudge, a level 4 minion, is only a viable opponent up through 9th level, according to 4e. So we won't ever see 100+ Drudges going against a PC of sufficiently high level to compare to a 5e PC capable of upcasting fireball. THAT 4e PC is facing larger, more dangerous threats in the world, not hordes of low level orcs. This is a fundamental difference in how 4e structures the fictional space compared to 5e. Any claims of high level 5e PCs facing CR 1/2 orcs has no applicable parallel in 4e. The very construction of horde encounters is on different types of genre emulation and fictional structures.

In my 4e campaign, mid-paragon PCs fought hobgoblin phalanxes. Orc hordes could be statted up just the same, ie as swarms.

Which means you're not tracking 100 stat-blocks. You're tracking one per phalanx/horde.