April 3rd, Rule of 3

[Hussar]

Just to put a bit of context on how this discussion has been circling around for YEARS, I did a 30 second google search and found this thread from En World,

http://www.enworld.org/forum/d-d-4th-edition-discussion/221226-d-d-4th-edition-healing-right.html

right on the first page, discussing this issue in 2008, we have the following quote:

Because HP loss doesn't model wounds which impair your fighting efficiency?

It's abstract, and as long as you're willing to accept HP as a combination of fatigue, morale and actual wounds, it works. Yes, you have the falling example which is the most grevious offender in this system, IMO, and yes, sometimes you shouldn't heal to full when you've been down to 1 HP...

But get over it. =) HP has always been abstract, unless you play that a 10th level fighter can literally suffer ten times as many sword wounds as a 1st level fighter. If you do, well, just acknowledge that seeing as how he can suffer ten times the wounds as a normal warrior, he's also capable of fast healing.

So, it's not like there's any sudden change of opinion going on here.

Reading that thread was actually kinda fun.

The last post in the thread pretty much encapsulates my view though:

It's funny that I was just making this same exact point in another thread. Some folks like their hp to be purely abstract. Others like them to be purely physical. I fall somewhere in the middle. All these styles of play are valid, and it looks like (HP-wise, at least) 4e could be all things to all people.

And, for me, that's the bottom line. I can replicate earlier D&D style HP with 4e mechanics. It's doable. It's been shown to be quite easily done. What I cannot do is replicate 4e style HP with earlier mechanics. So, for me, it's a case of one set of mechanics being more versatile than another. If one set of mechanics supports more playstyles than another set of mechanics, then that first set of mechanics is better.

So, can someone, please, pretty please, show me how I can get 4e style HP's and pacing with 3e mechanics? I've been asking this over and over again for a couple of weeks now, and no one seems to want to take up the challenge.

 

[pemerton]

Just to put a bit of context on how this discussion has been circling around for YEARS, I did a 30 second google search and found this thread from En World

Here's another 2008 post:

Linking together "hit point damage" and "physical injury" as an automatic assumption is something that I can understand. It's fairly obvious and consistent with D&D throughout the editions.

However, linking together "regaining hit points" and "injuries disappearing" is an assumption that D&D players in this thread are making - it is not something that is in the rules. It doesn't matter if this assumption is referred to over and over again - it is not in the RAW, nor the RAI.

Therefore - when a Warlord uses Inspiring Word, all they are doing is the mechanical "regaining hit points" effect, not the "making injuries disappear" effect that is being added on. And as such, when a Warlord uses Inspiring Word they are helping a character continue with the fight, not fixing physical injuries.

Is anyone seriously suggesting that a person might read this post, and then assume that in the poster's game, although healing surge expenditure does not make injuries heal, healing surge recovery does?

 

[pemerton]

So, can someone, please, pretty please, show me how I can get 4e style HP's and pacing with 3e mechanics?

I can't offer an answer as to how, but I have serious doubts that it can be done.

At least to the best of my knowledge, there is nothing in 3E analogous to the incombat use of healing surges in 4e - and this incombat "unlocking" of healing surges is crucial to 4e's pacing. It is a big part of why 4e PCs win combats even though monsters have more hit points. And it makes sure that producing this result requires engaging the situation and the mechanics with some sophistication. (For this reason, at least, easy surgeless healing in 4e is bad design.)

 

[Balesir]

I see what you mean. I tend to include that in this category, with harn master being on the gritty, granular end of it and something like vampire being on the light end. The key commonality (for me) that makes it a wound system in both cases is that physical damage impacts your performance (so there is an attempt to simulate being hurt). Wheras a game like D&D doesn't really do that.

Funnily enough, recent research suggestions that wounds in combat seldom cause general performance deterioration - basically, a wound either causes the target to become incapacitated, results in purely mechanical damage that removes or restricts the use of limbs, eyes, etc. or results in no immediate effects on combat performance - have led me to run HM while dispensing with the "Physical Penalty" to skills. In this specific sense, I think D&D may be (albeit unwittingly) more "realistic" than many so-called-realistic RPGs!

The real distinction, to my mind, comes with the out-of-combat effects (i.e. when the adrenaline is no longer "turbocharging" the body) and the recovery mechanisms.

Strictly speaking this is true. But only to the same extent that it is true in prior systems. However, the 4E surge system dds obligation that force you to choose demands that were previously absent.

If you DO choose to have "physically wounded" then you are required for the naked fighter in the woods to go back to fully charged the next morning despite having been "physically wounded".

Yes - or you can add a simple houserule that healing surges are recovered only in part and in an amount depending on the comfort and facilities of resting. Why is this any more of an issue than the "unrealistic natural healing" some complained of in earlier editions?

Or you can avoid that issue by choosing to forego ever having "physical wounds".

Or you can mix-and-match both views to your own taste - and each individual at the table can do so for themselves, without the need to insist that all others do so in the same way as them. The wounded creature has or does not have physical wounds as suits the viewer's own aesthetic preferences; the only "restriction" is that the mechanics prescribe whether or not the creature is in any way impeded in function by those injuries (or the stress, fatigue, lack of divine grace or whatever is assumed to be the cause of any present or previous loss of hit points).

I have freedom to select whatever I want in the system I use with no requirement of choosing one of those restrictions.

Yeah - so do I.

I won't dispute that "correct" for gaming is subjective taste. But there are very clear and significant differences.

There are differences, but I sincerely doubt that either one of us has any real idea what the "real" system is, let alone has the right to dictate what relation any chosen game system should have to the real-world workings of wounding and recovery in all its many facets.

But the problem is 4E *DOES NOT* have these four states.
I could grab a character sheet up in the middle of a 4E game and show it to you and it would be completely impossible for you to tell if a character was in state (2) or state (4). They are mechanically indistinguishable.VAnd even that isn't really saying it right. It isn't that they are indistinguishable, it is that they are one and the same.

Of course they are mechanically indistinguishable - that's kind of a "by definition" point. So are a character wearing silk stockings and the same one wearing canvas braies. So is a character who currently basks in the approval of the Duke and one who is an outcast from the kingdom. The fiction, as well as the mechanics, can be important in any roleplaying game. Whether or not some imagined identity exists between physical injury and hit points will have no appreciable impact on that, I imagine.

I'm not BryonD but in my view this is a game-mechanically impossible state. Whatever else hit points might claim to represent, they also reflect physical damage.

Says who?

Except the direct mechanical impact of physical injury is loss of h.p., pure and simple. In other words, the presence of such damage *always* has a mechanical impact.

This might be commonly assumed to be true (although there is a matter of degree - does a paper cut cause HP loss?), but the converse is not: the recovery of hit points does not at all necessarily imply the complete healing of a physical wound.

Another way to put it: you can lose h.p. without sustaining actual physical harm but you cannot sustain actual physical harm without losing h.p.

So, in your games, if a character stubs its toe, it loses hit points? If it pulls a muscle, it loses hit points? It gets a paper cut, it loses hit points?

And, more to the point, as mentioned by Hussar, above, if a character still has a bruise but the knock happened a couple of (game-world) days ago, are they really still down HPs??

I can see the attraction of the identity, but I don't think it even holds water, never mind being a mandatory identity in the rules of any edition of D&D (which it manifestly isn't).

 

[Guest 85555]

Funnily enough, recent research suggestions that wounds in combat seldom cause general performance deterioration - basically, a wound either causes the target to become incapacitated, results in purely mechanical damage that removes or restricts the use of limbs, eyes, etc. or results in no immediate effects on combat performance - have led me to run HM while dispensing with the "Physical Penalty" to skills. In this specific sense, I think D&D may be (albeit unwittingly) more "realistic" than many so-called-realistic RPGs!

The real distinction, to my mind, comes with the out-of-combat effects (i.e. when the adrenaline is no longer "turbocharging" the body) and the recovery mechanisms..

Do you have a link?

 

[pemerton]

Of course they are mechanically indistinguishable - that's kind of a "by definition" point. So are a character wearing silk stockings and the same one wearing canvas braies. So is a character who currently basks in the approval of the Duke and one who is an outcast from the kingdom. The fiction, as well as the mechanics, can be important in any roleplaying game.

Exactly.

 

[Balesir]

Do you have a link?

Sorry, no - the pickup for me came from a whole string leading from long, rambling threads involving Brian Gleichmann (and his "Age of Heroes" RPG) on rec.games.frp.advocacy to police "use of armed force" reports to military combat study quotes. I don't know of anywhere it's really coherently expressed on the 'net.

P.S. - I should also note that I don't claim anything even vaguely approaching "proof" or even "evidence" for this angle - just sufficient anecdotal backup to make me relaxed about trying it in a game of imaginary reality, which is to say, a minimal amount!

 

[Guest 85555]

Sorry, no - the pickup for me came from a whole string leading from long, rambling threads involving Brian Gleichmann (and his "Age of Heroes" RPG) on rec.games.frp.advocacy to police "use of armed force" reports to military combat study quotes. I don't know of anywhere it's really coherently expressed on the 'net.

P.S. - I should also note that I don't claim anything even vaguely approaching "proof" or even "evidence" for this angle - just sufficient anecdotal backup to make me relaxed about trying it in a game of imaginary reality, which is to say, a minimal amount!

I was genuinely interested in the link, so not trying to box you in a corner with the link request or anything like that.

My own opinion about real world fighting and in game is that it often boils down to how you want to cut things up and capturing reality at a granular level gets pretty tricky, so you are best off using whatever system "feels real" to you if believaility is something you prize.

 

[Libramarian]

Such as? Apart from the ability to avoid future wounds (the first scenario) or the ability to press on unhindered despite the sum total of the wounds already sustained (the second scenario), I am unable to recall any significant part of the system that treats a character at full hit points and one down to 1 hp any differently.

A wounded character is less capbale of absorbing more damage before succumbing. This is a critically important distinction.

Yes! Holy moly. Wounded characters are easier to kill. They have less stamina in deadly combat. This is a very vivid and important difference between characters at full HP and characters at low HP.

There's something else going on that is exaggerating the difference in opinion over HP here...

Maybe the "HP have always been completely meta" crowd are used to 4e where HP attrition has practically no consequence on future battles. This hitpoint issue would be interacting with the encounter balance issue.

In AD&D hitpoints don't feel completely abstract and meta. If you're walking around low on hitpoints you actually feel wounded, because getting into a fight is riskier than it would be at full hitpoints.

If you're playing a system where HP loss has little effect on future battle performance, well then yeah you're going to think that the system doesn't treat your character any differently depending on HP.

This is why I said in an earlier thread that by my lights you don't need progressive penalties for HP loss to be a death spiral. It already is one. Losing HP makes it progressively more likely that your character will die -- that's a death spiral. A mechanic without a death spiral would be saving vs. death at the same chance whenever you're hit.

 

[FireLance]

Maybe the "HP have always been completely meta" crowd are used to 4e where HP attrition has practically no consequence on future battles. This hitpoint issue would be interacting with the encounter balance issue.

In AD&D hitpoints don't feel completely abstract and meta. If you're walking around low on hitpoints you actually feel wounded, because getting into a fight is riskier than it would be at full hitpoints.

If you're playing a system where HP loss has little effect on future battle performance, well then yeah you're going to think that the system doesn't treat your character any differently depending on HP.

Actually, the key factor that determines whether hit point loss has an impact on future fights is the availability of healing or other ways to restore hit points. That is a completely separate point from whether the restoration of hit points is magical in nature, and can be narrated as wounds healing, or non-magical in nature, and should be narrated as the ability to avoid future wounds, or the ability to press on despite wounds.

You can have a game where rapid hit point restoration is rare and magical, or a game where rapid hit point restoration is common and magical, or a game where rapid hit point restoration is common and both magical and non-magical. Presumably, you could also have a game where rapid hit point restoration is rare and both magical and non-magical, but I personally have not encountered one yet.