Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9217345" data-attributes="member: 8461">Except it's quite clearly not the same, because the "hp can be injury or loss of resilience" paradigm first requires you to pick one or the other: injury or loss of resilience. Then you go deeper into what the specifics are. Acknowleding that hit point loss/recovery is just injury starts you off as already having made the first determination that the other method requires you to adjudicate, meaning that your first action under that paradigm is already done for you.And because we're not told anything more, we then have to go in and fill in the blanks ourselves, rather than the game having done them for us. See the aforementioned problem of hit point loss that's injury, versus recovery that's upping your personal state of mind, to the point where you've successively lost more of the former and regained enough of the latter until it's hard to characterize how it is your character is still alive.What you're doing here is essentially saying that you shouldn't sweat the small stuff, which is an implicit acknowledgment that the small stuff matters even if you don't deal with it. Forests are, at the end of the day, made up of trees, and so examining them can give you an overall picture of the health of the forest. (The irony being that if 4E leaned a bit harder into the idea that inspiring word is "helping them heal" rather than being a boost to their mindset, it would be a lot less problematic.)And I addressed that in turn.Saying that hit point loss/recovery represents more than just injury or personal mindset only requires the players to make even further adjudications, though, if they want to map what the game's operations are telling them to what's happening in the game world. Again, I'll point to the example of the character who takes "fire damage" being indicative that they've taken injury from heat, and that can't be treated by someone giving a rousing speech, so that when they take successive injuries and yet regain hit points from more inspiring words, there's a cognitive gap in that they've been injured far past their hit point total, and yet it's still above 0 due to their state of mind being positive.It's not helpful if it requires you to carry a load that the game itself could carry on your behalf. I can understand the idea that it's freeing to say that the game is putting forward absolutely nothing, and so nothing is holding you back from describing the in-character nature of what's happening in any manner of your choosing. But to a lot of people, myself included, that's an additional degree of work that I'd rather the game did on my behalf. To extend the stair analogy, I'd rather buy a house that I might need to make some modest tweaks to than build my own dream home from the ground up. The interpretation that D&D makes of its own mechanical operations is a pre-fab house, and denying those is essentially knocking (parts of) it down so you can build something else. That's absolutely your prerogative, but it's undeniably a lot more work.And I can understand the idea that there's a point where the game interpreting what's happening becomes cumbersome (which is typically found when there are excessive mechanical operations modeling information that the player(s) don't care about), but that's a continuum that different people will fall onto different areas of. That said, trying to have a single mechanic pull double-duty in terms of representing different things still necessarily requires the people playing to adjudicate which one is being used in any given instance of that mechanic's use. Ergo, that's too far in the other direction for people who'd rather the game handle that on its own.It's more accurate to say you're in danger of not keeping up with how 4E is different from other editions.And didn't it turn out well for doing that. Great job there, 4E!On the contrary, 4E is extremely vague in terms of telling us what's happening from the in-game perspective, at least when compared to its predecessors. Hence why it can't make up its mind if hit point loss/recovery is an issue of injury or resilience. Remember, the vagueness comes from the fact that by having the same operation be one thing in one instance, and another in another instance, leaving the players to keep track of two different things via one mechanic over the course of play. That the individual applications aren't ambiguous isn't the issue; that they track them via the same operation is.Please stop presuming that I'm using the term "gamist" only for things I personally dislike or that my use of "simulationism" is self-proclaimed, since neither of those are true, and saying otherwise only serves to derail the discussion (even more, I mean). The powers rely on telling you that different things are represented via the same mechanical operation, which means that you have one thing representing multiple different things in the game world, quite possibly at the same time, due to the fact that 4E puts a premium on a gamist presentation and reduces its focus on (coherent) simulationism.And when I ask others to describe that, they say that it's not a problem because they can either fix it, or ignore it altogether. That's not repudiating the idea that it's a problem in-and-of itself. Again, stepping over the broken stair doesn't mean it's not broken. Repairing it doesn't mean it's not broken. Tearing down the entire staircase doesn't mean it's not broken (though it being broken might actually be beneficial, then, since you have that much less work to do in breaking it down). All of those accurately extend the analogy to why some people don't find having one operation for hit point loss/recovery to be a problem, which is absolutely fine, but that doesn't mean that there's no issue there in the first place.I had a much more snarky response prepared, but that would go against the moderation note that was made earlier; I'll instead ask you to dial back the hostility.If they're not restoring "the same" hit points, then why does the character only have a single pool of hit points, from which all such operations take effect? That really goes to the heart of the issue here; if 4E had used a wound/vitality system, this wouldn't be an issue, and while I can certainly understand why it didn't (i.e. hit points having become a definitional characteristic of what D&D is), the fact is that the game unto itself suffered for it. If they're not "the same" hit points, they shouldn't be in "the same" pool.Yes, the cognitive gap exists: when tracking hit point/loss recovery over the course of play, the onus is on the player to model the interplay of two different interpretations of the same mechanical operation in representing what's happening in the game world. There's a gap, in other words, that the game doesn't bridge, leaving it up to their cognition to handle. That some players don't care doesn't mean it isn't there. The phenomenon of tying two (or more, as you've asserted) different ideas to this single operation is what creates it. It's a problem because some players (not all, but some) would rather not handle this task, particularly since it should be trivially easy for the game rules to handle it (and indeed, we've seen multiple ways that the game has handled it previously).As I said, not everyone is going to have an issue with it. But enough people did that it impacted (in accordance with numerous other issues) 4E's overall reception. It wasn't a make-or-break issue, as far as I know, for a lot of people, but it was absolutely something that they held against the game, which is why it repeatedly came up in discussions related to it. "Damage on a miss," which is a related phenomenon (being related to hit point loss not being an injury) was brought up many, many times over the years, for instance.Again, you yourself have noted that characters might not be regaining "the same" hit points that they lost. And yet there's only one pool of hit points. So which hit points are they regaining or losing in a given instance, and why should the player have to do the work of keeping those tallied over the course of play, presuming that they think that's important to do?I think it's important not to put forward that you know what someone else's state of mind is, let alone accuse them of disingenuousness, if for no other reason than it ruins the tenor of the thread.</blockquote>

Verification