April 3rd, Rule of 3

[Hussar]

/snip

i suspect it may have something to do with putting it in the player's court to decide when he is physically damaged--the moment you use a surge you are damaged)...and alot of 4E stuff seems to be after the fact narration (we dont know what happened, when it happened, only after). Which kind of bothers me as well.

Sorry, but what?

When you take damage, you take damage. If you have 50 HP and 10 healing surges and you lose 20 hp, you now have 30 HP and 10 healing surges. You've taken damage. Feel free to narrate that however you like.

The next round, you spend a healing surge (from whatever source) and you now have 50 HP and 9 healing surges (note, the numbers I'm using here are wrong, just illustration). Your total hit points remain exactly the same. The only difference is that you can now take more hits before dying than you could before.

But, at no point do you have to narrate the damage after the fact.

 

[Hussar]

What I find very funny about all the criticisms of inconsistency with 4e hp is this idea that earlier editions were somehow internally consistent. That somehow going more abstract with HP has made HP inconsistent.

That's simply not true and it's easy to show. Take 3 characters. Character 1 is a 3rd level fighter, character 2 is a 5th level rogue and character 3 is an 8th level wizard. All three characters have 20 hp.

They all get into the same situation. A fight with an orc with a greataxe. The orc wins initiative, rolls a crit and does 29 points of damage to each character. Each character is now at -9 HP, a hair away from dying. The orc is vanquished by the character's allies and the character is stablized. However the party does not have any magical healing, and thus, must rely on natural healing.

Now, all three characters have exactly the same HP, have suffered exactly the same wound and are recovering in exactly the same way - attended bed rest.

The fighter takes 5 days to completely heal (using 3e rules). The rogue takes 3 days to completely heal. The wizard takes 2 days to completely heal.

How is this consistent? All three characters are identical in every way - same HP, same stats, everything. Yet, the fighter takes twice as long to recover as the wizard?

Additionally, for you folks that believe so fervently in HP=Meat, what narration would you use for the blow that felled all three PC's? It has to be a very serious blow from a greataxe that was almost instantly lethal, yet completely recoverable in two days. Not even so much as a bruise remaining - after all, all the PC's have full HP. If HP=Meat, then they cannot have any visible effect of damage if they have full HP can they?

I can buy the argument that you don't like the pacing inherent in 4e healing mechanics. I can buy that 4e's martial healing is wonky. I can even buy that it's too fiddly.

But consistency? Really?

 

[I'm A Banana]

Now this is a point I hadn't actually considered. But, let's not forget, a 3e PC's whose down to 2 HP has likely lost 80+% of his HP. To get the same thing in 4e, you'd have to burn through those healing surges first.

Is the actual issue that the 4e PC's just have SO many HP? Between your base damage threshold and surges, 4e PC's have hundreds of HP, even at very modest levels.

That's not entirely the problem, though it certainly is related. It's a lot like FireLance mentioned: it's kind of a "massive damage save," and it has the same problem that a massive damage effect does, and that is that you can die with ALL THESE HIT POINTS LEFT.

When you take damage, you take damage. If you have 50 HP and 10 healing surges and you lose 20 hp, you now have 30 HP and 10 healing surges. You've taken damage. Feel free to narrate that however you like.

That's kind of the thing, though, it's hard in 4e to narrate that however you like. If a PC takes enough damage to go down, I can't say, "You get stabbed in the gut with the goblin's knife and fall down, clutching your bleeding wound," because five minutes later, hey boy howdy, you're back up to full HP (even if you're down surges). Clearly, that wasn't a stab to the gut.

Of course, in the middle of combat, maybe that was a stab to the gut -- you're rolling death saves and could actually die and have no HP left, so the danger is real. But after combat, oh, maybe it wasn't real? That certainly rings false to me.

That's the kind of problems the surge idea creates: this new idea that how you narrate damage has to take into account not just the PC's hp, and how close to death they are, but perhaps the surges, and perhaps not the surges, depending on if they die during combat, or not.

I mean, if surges are meat, then you've got PC's who can die from things that aren't really damage. And if HP is meat since you can die from damage, then surges are magical healing springs inside of people.

Again, I like a lot of the things that surround surges. Second Wind is boffo. I like the idea of healing 1/4 your HP when you take a "rest" (be it five minutes or overnight). "Rest" values are very useful in healing.

But the idea of splitting HP into in-encounter and out-of-encounter resources is not what I like. HP are HP are HP.

 

[BryonD]

By "signs" do you mean physical marks - bruises, cuts etc - or physical impediments?

Haven't we been down this road like 5 times already?

I mean every mechanical effect of having been harmed.

Burning a surge resource is game mechanically equivalent to burning a CMW spell. Some other resource may be gone, but the wound itself is mechanically removed.

There is nothing in the 4e rules that suggests either surge expenditure (following a short rest, or the application of some healing power) or surge recovery (following an extended rest) means that all physical marks of injury have gone away. But obviously surge expenditure means that the PC is now able to press on (although pressing on now taxes the ability to do so later, as surges are a finite resource), and surge recovery means that whatever injuries were sustained are no longer a burden on the PC's ability to press on (in 4e, mojo is recovered with an overnight rest).

You can roleplay "limping", but your HP are back and wounds will NEVER have any mechanical impact on you ever again. According to the mechanics they have been removed.

A 4E character with 18 HP gets hit for 10 points damage. He can press on. Or he can surge and then press on. The surge does nothing to change his ability to press on.

What the surge does is give him back some portion of those 10 HP, undoing the effect of the wound.

I've had players choose to roleplay being marked and/or in discomfort even after healing if they received a high HP damage attack. That can be cool. And that is the same as what you are offering here, so again 4E hasn't even offered anything new on that front.

But what 4E HAS done is say that mechanically speaking the wound in gone, without requiring any cause.

 

[BryonD]

If a PC takes enough damage to go down, I can't say, "You get stabbed in the gut with the goblin's knife and fall down, clutching your bleeding wound," because five minutes later, hey boy howdy, you're back up to full HP (even if you're down surges). Clearly, that wasn't a stab to the gut.

I'm happy to be corrected, but my understanding of what pemerton has stated in this thread is that short of "fatal" wounds, HP loss in 4E should pretty much always be bumps and mojo and not "real wounds".

 

[BryonD]

How is this consistent?

Easy.

All three characters are identical in every way - same HP, same stats, everything.

You are wrong right there.

One is a fighter. One is a wizard. One is a rogue.
If you completely ignore narrative and focus purely on gamism, then sure, they are identical.

Narratively speaking the nature of their wounds can be vastly different because the nature of what their HP represent are different.

And it seems to me that anyone who is ok with Come and Get It applying to a guard one day, a mindless skeleton the next, and an ooze the following, should find seeing these HP differences as completely trivial.

 

[Andor]

Additionally, for you folks that believe so fervently in HP=Meat, what narration would you use for the blow that felled all three PC's? It has to be a very serious blow from a greataxe that was almost instantly lethal, yet completely recoverable in two days. Not even so much as a bruise remaining - after all, all the PC's have full HP. If HP=Meat, then they cannot have any visible effect of damage if they have full HP can they?

I won't argue that all editions have oddness with HP, although I do think that the non-magical healing of 4e leads to some real oddness, E.G: Lava + peptalk = g2g.

However I disagree that full HP means not even a bruise. Full HP means no damage that brings you closer to death. I've slashed myself open and gotten stitches. Was an open bleeding wound that required medical attention hp damage? I'd say so. That scar didn't completely heal for weeks. Was I down HP that whole time? I don't think so. I was back at work the next day. It twinged occasionally for a day or two, but didn't hinder me in any way. I think I was back to full hp the next morning, or a couple of days at the outside, even though I still bore a visible wound.

So no, full HP doesn't mean no bruises, or how do you justify any hit meaning actual physical contact under 4es "One nights sleep pays for all" healing system?

 

[I'm A Banana]

I'm happy to be corrected, but my understanding of what pemerton has stated in this thread is that short of "fatal" wounds, HP loss in 4E should pretty much always be bumps and mojo and not "real wounds".

You can go with that, but then it's possible for your characters to go unconscious and die from mojo loss and bumps, since you can die when you're completely full of surges if you forget to spend them or don't have a healer around.

Which doesn't quite seem right, either.

 

[BryonD]

You can go with that, but then it's possible for your characters to go unconscious and die from mojo loss and bumps, since you can die when you're completely full of surges if you forget to spend them or don't have a healer around.

Which doesn't quite seem right, either.

Oh, don't get me wrong. I'm not endorsing that approach at all.

(Though I'm pretty certain that pemerton would describe the wound that actually put you into negatives as "real". So it isn't quite that bad.)

In 4E you can solve the fighters make wounds vanish problem by removing wounds or you can solve the no wounds problem by letting fighters make wounds vanish. Mechanically either way works and you can even bounce back and forth if you want.

I just find both options unacceptable when there are such better options for narrative.


Mostly I was just agreeing with your counter to Hussar and pointing out that (again, to the best of my understanding) even pemerton agrees with you on that.

 

[Hussar]

Easy.


You are wrong right there.

One is a fighter. One is a wizard. One is a rogue.
If you completely ignore narrative and focus purely on gamism, then sure, they are identical.

Narratively speaking the nature of their wounds can be vastly different because the nature of what their HP represent are different.

And it seems to me that anyone who is ok with Come and Get It applying to a guard one day, a mindless skeleton the next, and an ooze the following, should find seeing these HP differences as completely trivial.

So, despite the fact that all three are human, have exactly the same stats, their character class is used as an in-game explanation for the weaker (wizard) character healing more than TWICE as fast as the fighter? And, for some bizarre reason, 1 HP in a fighter is somehow entirely different than 1 HP in a wizard or a rogue. And that's an argument for consistency?

You're telling me that you have no problem narrating three identical wounds, doing exactly the same thing to three different characters in completely different ways and that's somehow consistent but 4e isn't?

It would seem to me that if you have no problems using meta-game elements like class and level to explain in game reality, you would see this as trivial.

Unless, of course, your players introduce themselves as, "I'm Bartholomew, the 7th level paladin." I could see it working then.

Burning a surge resource is game mechanically equivalent to burning a CMW spell. Some other resource may be gone, but the wound itself is mechanically removed.

No, it isn't. For one, unless you're the cleric, someone else is spending the resources and those resources may be virtually infinite (healing wands) and completely divorced from any specific character. Surges can never be added to, although there are a few surgeless healing resources.

It's no different than my 100 hp character taking 10 damage. I have 90 hp left. My 50 hp, down one surge character, is exactly the same.

Although, that being said,

That's not entirely the problem, though it certainly is related. It's a lot like FireLance mentioned: it's kind of a "massive damage save," and it has the same problem that a massive damage effect does, and that is that you can die with ALL THESE HIT POINTS LEFT.

I can sorta see the issue here. I think it stems from the idea that HP=HP=HP. All HP are equal. I'm not sure I agree, but, that's probably because I like the HP as resource that the player can manage mini-game.

But, yes, I totally recognize that this is an issue. I'm not sure how you could resolve it to be honest. And, no, "go back to 3e" is not a solution for me, since it's every bit as unbelievable to me as 4e is to you.

The goal here is to find a system that satisfies both of us.