April 3rd, Rule of 3

[Lanefan]

2. ... Furthermore, a mortal wound can be identified as such in the moment; a character who is on the ground dying (negative hit points, making death saves) is really on the ground dying, not in a Schrodinger's Cat state where they are both mortally wounded and merely knocked out until something happens to force them into one state or the other (the warlord yells at them, they die, etc.).

That'd be Schrodinger's Wounded Cat, eventually to become Schrodinger's Dying Cat if no help arrives; soon leading to Schrodinger's Dead Cat which is really kinda useless.

3. It is never a good strategy to wait until somebody's hit points go negative before dropping a healing spell on that person. I see this All. The. Time. in 4E, and it's a major nuisance.

Simple way to houserule a fix here: someone who goes below 0 h.p. cannot be cured above 10% of their total until some time (an hour or two) has passed, except by heavy-duty cures e.g. Heal.

Lanefan

 

[Lanefan]

I just woke up so be kind and this is totally off the top of my caffeine deprived head but what if there was a XP price to be paid for non-magical healing and more widely a way to spend XP's in-game and not simply hoard like like Dragons until you accumulate enough to level-up.

Thoughts?

Interesting idea but I suspect it'd go over like a lead balloon given the number of people* who didn't like paying XP for spellcasting and-or item creation in 3e - which is somewhat more significant.

* - including me

Also, how do you possibly narrate the idea of losing experience to gain health?

Lan-"I feel better, but I don't remember why"-efan

 

[BryonD]

6 friends rolling dice and cracking wise around a table is better than two sets of 3 at differetn tables, even if half if them miss Prestige Classes and the other half misses Paragon Paths.

No offense. But I hate that argument. I find it COMPLETELY misses anything remotely relevant to the conversation.

I play with good friends. I will continue to play with good friends. We have a great time.

Playing a great game with great friends is better than playing an ok game with great friends. And even if the difference is just going from 98 to 99 on a scale of 100, we are not talking about my friends here and nothing WotC designs is going to change the friends variable.

 

[YRUSirius]

I just woke up so be kind and this is totally off the top of my caffeine deprived head but what if there was a XP price to be paid for non-magical healing and more widely a way to spend XP's in-game and not simply hoard like like Dragons until you accumulate enough to level-up.

Thoughts?

Dave

Why not just gold? -> Healing potions.

I'm hesitant to say this, but... almost every video roleplaying game has tons of healing potions for "non magical" healing. One might even say they took the idea from... D&D? Isn't that something more iconic to D&D than some complex kind of wound/vitality?

-YRUSirius

 

[Mattachine]

Lots of us don't want to play a video-game style game. Third edition, did this, by the way. I wasn't a fan.

 

[avin]

Lots of us don't want to play a video-game style game. Third edition, did this, by the way. I wasn't a fan.

One could argue AD&D2E is the best "video-game style" D&D, because of Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale and Planescape: Torment. NWN and TOEE were successful games, but not as aclaimed as the former. Both 2E and 3E had smooth videogamey implementations.

4E, which people accuse of being a MMO or videogamey, is the last successful D&D edition for videogames. It would be horrible to adapt 4E to an MMO, it just won't work... like it or hate it, 4E is a tactical game, far more closer to FF Tactics or any real turn based game than Wow.

 

[Andor]

4E, which people accuse of being a MMO or videogamey, is the last successful D&D edition for videogames. It would be horrible to adapt 4E to an MMO, it just won't work... like it or hate it, 4E is a tactical game, far more closer to FF Tactics or any real turn based game than Wow.

I believe the point under discussion was that in most crpgs healing potions/plants/foods are plentiful and available at most merchants. Hence between combat healing is plentiful.

On a side note FFT is my favorite videogame, so I'm not sure I grasp your argument. When I first read 4e I thought "Wow. This system would be great for modeling Agrias."

 

[avin]

I believe the point under discussion was that in most crpgs healing potions/plants/foods are plentiful and available at most merchants. Hence between combat healing is plentiful.

My bad, I miss the first part of discussion. But still, I was just pointing out that (in some weird way) AD&D2E was the most videogamey D&D edition

On a side note FFT is my favorite videogame, so I'm not sure I grasp your argument. When I first read 4e I thought "Wow. This system would be great for modeling Agrias."

FFT is nice, FF6 is my favorite, tho

 

[pemerton]

For me, that last bit -- "before they are too fatigued to avoid serious harm" -- hits my suspension of disbelief upside the face.

But it's the key to the pacing function of 4e's surges.

(And I personally don't feel the suspension of disbelief issue - if I'm playing a game of heroic figures who can push on through near-impossible odds, and who always have luck on their side, I can handle the fact that some of their pushing on requires a quick rest.)

It's unnecessary. Y'know, if the party wants to keep trying to fight a battle after taking a tremendous amount of damage, that's up to them. They've got HP enough to last through 2-3 battles in 4e with this method.

Whereas this approach would completely lose the pacing/gameplay aspect of surges - which is that combat tactics include "unlocking" them as an important element, and this creates a dynamic of dependence among the PCs, which in turn creates an experience of team play at the table - which is a significant part of how 4e produces the experience of D&D party play.

What gameplay elements do you want to preserve?

If it's the "unlockable" nature of surges, doesn't limited healing serve the same purpose? "Okay, I have X hp, but my party has a total of 4 healing powers that each heal me for (X * .25) HP, so some of my HP are functionally in other folks' healing powers."

Not at all.

In 4e, nearly every combat requires clever, team-dependent play to unlock surges so as to allow the PCs to triumph. In a game in which PCs just have big gobs of hp, the need to unlock surges in combat won't occur until the Nth combat (if we look at 3E and 4e, N is probably equal to something like 4 or 5). Until the Nth combat, the PCs won't be close to running out of hit points, and any healing will take place outside of combat (in order to top up the gradually depleting fuel tank) - which is not dramatic at all, and doesn't produce the party play dynamic that 4e's incombat healing does.

(Or are you suggesting that PCs keep their current hp levels, and 2x/enc healing becomes something like 8x/day healing? Which still doesn't preserve the 4e game play, because it waters down the tactical resource management issue on the healer side, and it also removes the balancing-surge-use-across-all-the-PCs dimension of 4e play.)

"Hit" means "hit" rather than "miss," "heal" means "heal" rather than "catch your breath," and "damage" means "damage" rather than "tired." Abstraction is one thing, but I'm not on board with any system that requires rewriting the dictionary. If you want hit point recovery that isn't healing, stop using "heal" as a synonym for "regain hit points." A hit that deals damage can be a glancing blow, shallow cut, etc., but anything that's called a "hit" should physically connect and anything that's called "damage" should be some kind of injury, even if only superficial.

On this approach, though, how would you model a character not undergoing any physical recovery, but nevertheless - by being comforted, or encouraged, or bullied, or just powerfully self-willed - pushing on and overcoming the shock/pain/physical hindrance?

In 4e this, just as much as physical healing, is modelled by hp recovery. It's an elegant feature, in my view, and it makes room for a smooth handling of effects like shock and fear causing psychic damage without needing to create any sort of separate "morale pool" that then interacts with the "wound" pool.

 

[Balesir]

Because "2 hp" already has an established meaning in my mind, and I don't see any virtue in changing it for this purpose. I can easily play a game that works very well in which "2 hp" means what I think it means. There's no need to change that interpretation, and no benefit to me for doing so.

2 hp is "nearly dead"?? I don't see how this can stand up; a magic user starts with 2 hp total - is he slowed down by the heart-lung machine he has to adventure with?? The only hp values with any real meaning in D&D are zero (which has always been there - you are dead, incapacitated or dying) and half-hp (bloodied; came in with 4E but I hear hardly a whisper against it).

Healing surges are a way for people who don't want to think about strategy alive, as in operational parameters. Its not so much, 'how do we fight this encounter?' as ' do we fight this encounter?'

I think you have misidentified your target; this effect does exist in 4E (as well as all previous editions, for a specific approach to play), but it has nothing to do with healing surges.

It has to do with Extended Rests - or, more specifically, the recovery of healing surges. Because this is tied to game-world ephemerae rather than system functions, there are only two options: (1) the DM designs to limit rests via fiat plus excuses (excuses optional, strictly speaking), or (2) the "resources" of healing surges and daily powers lose all relevance as they can be recharged arbitrarily.

Having healing surges purely decouples the recovery capacity between encounters from the number of clerics in the party. This I regard as no bad thing.

Making surges (or any type of healing capacity, for that matter) a resource limited only by the game-world conceit of time passing is a major system flaw that has been present since the earliest editions. Kludge "cures", such as expensive healing potions, heavy potions (and heavy money!) with limited carrying capacity and so on have been tried from time to time. But the core problem has never been addressed.

The answer seems to me to ba a mite tricky. Standardising adventure design (so that X amount of "adventure" must be tackled before a long rest or that adventure "stage" is failed and the rewards from it lost, for example) might be one way. Relating the amount of resource recovered to the amount spent before resting might be another - or relating it to the XP earned since the last rest.

Just saying that resource recovery takes more game time, though, is pointless. "Game time" is meaningless in the real world - it gains relevance only via DM fiat - which is the most tedious and dysfunctional "system" I can imagine.

Simple way to houserule a fix here: someone who goes below 0 h.p. cannot be cured above 10% of their total until some time (an hour or two) has passed, except by heavy-duty cures e.g. Heal.

Ding! This has ocurred to me, too. To make a "realistic" (ha, ha - as realistic as D&D has ever been, at any rate) game of 4E all you need to do is declare that a character at zero or less hit points cannot spend healing surges. Only surgeless healing magic or potions will help. Job done.