D&D 4E Bridging the cognitive gap between how the game rules work and what they tell us about the setting

[Justice and Rule]

True. I just bypass the whole issue and have the possibility of lasting injury be a consequence of being brought to zero. I'm also bringing back proportional healing.

You could do things like lasting injuries with a threshold of sorts, like Star Wars: SAGA Edition had. I had a theoretical system I never actually used that did that sort of thing, where it was like "(HD type + Character Levels)/2 = Wound Threshold" and you got wounds equal to your Con Score rounding up. Each time that was exceeded, you took some sort of physical damage of some sort. It's more complicated, but that's kind of what we're asking for here, right?

 

[Voadam]

It does come down to that, and if you want the rules to provide an explanation, you're never going to be happy being told to make up whatever works for you in the moment.

Right, but the 4e healing word and inspiring word do give you default explanations you can use that work and are narratively appropriate for their different approaches and explain what they are doing in the world. You don't have to make up anything if you don't want to.

So the big 4e difference is explicitly saying feel free to reskin.

There are some 4e powers that are just mechanics with very little flavor. I was reading Dragon 369 the other night and some of the preview bard powers felt that way, but a lot of the 4e powers stuff has default flavor for you to use and build off of.

 

[Voadam]

True. I just bypass the whole issue and have the possibility of lasting injury be a consequence of being brought to zero. I'm also bringing back proportional healing.

5e proportional healing would be fantastic IMO. There could actually be mid-high level in combat healing that was worth doing beyond stabilize dying and pop them up to single digit hps or eventually full heal healing.

HD are OK, but it is only in short rests and has the whole guesstimate for your resource expenditure then roll aspect which I do not care for.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I'd say "epic fantasy," in that by the time you're able to lose that many hit points due to taking such incredible damage, you're pushing (if not completely beyond) the boundaries of mortality. It's xianxia by that point, which matches with the progressive nature of what characters at that stage can do. Which strikes me as entirely appropriate; 4E, like 3E, offers a dramatic scale in power across the levels that characters can progress through, so expectations of what the characters are capable of later in their careers should scale accordingly.

I can't speak to xianxia, but even in "epic fantasy" I don't see heroes actually "taking" such incredible damage.

Damage avoidance and mitigation seem much more common in genre. Rather than heroes getting their flesh melted off and regenerating or getting all their neck, limbs, and ribs broken and then healing them, you much more often see deflecting the fire breath with a shield or magical force field, or the fire just isn't as effective against this mythic flesh.

I think the power scales of xianxia might be too high even for 4E (at least if we are talking about stuff like I Shall Seal the Heavens). I will say I think 4E would make an excellent system for wuxia. I wasn't a huge fan of 4E for my regular D&D games, but I remember feeling like it would work for stuff like Condor Heroes or Sword of the Third Young Master

 

[bert1001 fka bert1000]

Except they're "different" in terms of how you characterize a single underlying principle, which is that "physical harm is being received." I noted elsewhere that this was akin to an order of operations, where the game rules takes you "down" to a certain level in that order, and then you have to take up the work yourself until you reach the level of contextualization you want:

1. Hit points have been restored, indicating damage has been healed.
2. Characterize the restoration in terms of the amount of hit points recovered versus the total hit points remaining and/or their maximum hit points.

Contrast this with what happens when you don't grant the premise that there's even any damage happening:

1. Hit points have been restored.
2. Determine if this is a healed injury or a replenishment of stamina.
3. Characterize the healing in the context of A) hit points recovered versus total hit points remaining and/or their maximum hit points, or B) in terms of why they've regained stamina.

So essentially, you've taken a two-step process and turned it into three steps; three-and-a-half if you look at the third have an A and B option that need to be parsed. That's a larger gap that you, the player, have to then bridge, because there's more than needs to be determined.

So yes, hit points have always required some contextualization; I never said otherwise. But the degree to which it walks you through the process before leaving the work to you is different in 4E than it was in earlier editions.

There is another way though.

1. Hit points have been restored, indicating that the character is farther away from being "taken out"
2. Characterize the restoration in terms of the amount of hit points recovered versus the total hit points remaining and/or their maximum hit points.

If hit points are taken as an somewhat abstract combination of minor wounds, fatigue, heroic resolve, luck, etc. that indicate how close you are to be "taken out", then HP restoration just means further away from being taken out, which can be accomplished through various means. And damage just means closer to being taken out. There is no attempt at assigning how much HP damage is due to meat or resolve or whatever. And there is no notion that a certain type of damage restoration is better than another at getting you further away from being "take out". I don't think inspiring word heals a cut. But no matter how badly physically damaged (which functionally never impairs you anyway) it does get you further away from being "taken out".

Now, I agree that "minor wounds" can be interpreted different ways. And if you wanted to you could depict Epic Level characters taking extreme physical damage and "pushing on". It's still functionally "minor wounds" though since in 4e (and in all editions) the fact is that any combination of "damage" that leaves you above 0 results is fully functioning.

I can see why someone may not be comfortable with this level of abstraction and why if they come at 4e with a different framing (which many people inherit from earlier editions) they could incur higher cogitative load, run into nonsense situations, etc.

But the position I take is that if you do embrace a certain mindset/framing, the cognitive load and gap lessened or disappears.

Again, I'm not arguing that you have to embrace this mindset/paradigm. Or like it. I'm just saying that the 3 step process is derived from approaching 4e with a paradigm that leads to this and that there is another paradigm that doesn't.

You can reduce the cognitive load/gaps if you approach the game with a different mental framework.

If your argument is that "when approaching it from X framework, W, Y Z happens" or "because a lot of people were used to approaching D&D from X mental framework, then W, Y, Z usually happened and turned people off" -- then I guess I don't have much to say to that. Seems true.

 

[MichaelSomething]

Roll 1d4 for a response


1.I'm fine with the traditional HP system if you're willing to play a heal bot Cleric.

2.Curse you wand of cure light wounds!

3. How come no one just rewrites a power to better represent the fiction it's trying to protray?

4. Some players don't see the value of jumping through mechanical loops for the sake of verisimilitude. They rather go through a faster and easier system that generates close enough results. If you value verisimilitude, feel free to do whatever it takes to achieve it.

 

[Zeromaru X]

So, if I understand this well, the problem of the cognitive gap is that people is mad 4e doesn't have rules for characters to do stuff like go to the bathroom? Did the earlier editions had rules for that or something?

 

[Zeromaru X]

By the reactions it seems I didn't get it (and I'm sorry if someone interpreted this as a joke; this was a positive question - I started D&D very late in 3.5 and never had the necessity to simulate). I just can't understand why is a problem that a game be just a game, and people needs all this simulationist stuff. Seriously, if you need rules for every mundane thing, the game just becomes unfun. It stops being a game and becomes something more akin an excel table...

As for the HP thing, if that is so immersion breaking, then just use 4e's alternative injuries system (Dungeon 204) and enjoy your game.

 

[Voadam]

By the reactions it seems I didn't get it (and I'm sorry if someone interpreted this as a joke; this was a positive question - I started D&D very late in 3.5 and never had the necessity to simulate). I just can't understand why is a problem that a game be just a game, and people needs all this simulationist stuff. Seriously, if you need rules for every mundane thing, the game just becomes unfun. It stops being a game and becomes something more akin an excel table...

D&D has multiple game aspects, one game part is rolling dice for attack and damage and making tactical choices, one game part is the narrative of what your characters are doing, the game of roleplaying and character immersion that continues even when dice are pulled out.

That cognitive effort that the players have to do to bridge the gap between what the mechanics are and what they tell us about the in-character state of play is the "cognitive gap."

I think the cognitive gap is problems in mechanically taking damage or restoring hp or whatever and turning that into actual narrative that makes sense.

So combat as more than just mechanical numbers attrition but also of interactive narrative heroic action.

 

[James Gasik]

By the reactions it seems I didn't get it (and I'm sorry if someone interpreted this as a joke; this was a positive question - I started D&D very late in 3.5 and never had the necessity to simulate). I just can't understand why is a problem that a game be just a game, and people needs all this simulationist stuff. Seriously, if you need rules for every mundane thing, the game just becomes unfun. It stops being a game and becomes something more akin an excel table...

As for the HP thing, if that is so immersion breaking, then just use 4e's alternative injuries system (Dragon 425) and enjoy your game.

Having engaged in many debates about 4e, it tends to comes down to this: other forms of D&D are just as much games as 4e, but maintain a veneer of plausibility when discussing the game and why it's rules are just so, perhaps even citing "realism" (while simultaneously scoffing at the concept in other parts of the system).

4e committed the sin of saying "hey, wait, it really is just a game, right? So let's present it thusly, and not worry about whether or not anything conforms to reality!". This, along with the creation of the universe, has generally been held to be a bad idea by many.

Because not only is 4e completely admitting it's a game, for those who enjoy a grittier playstyle with a heavier emphasis on verisimilitude (a word I didn't even know until WotC brought it up themselves!), 4e seems to be actively thumbing it's nose at such playstyles!*

*and some of the marketing and developer comments straight out thumb their noses at such concepts.

So once you're disinclined to like a thing in the first place, it becomes trivial to find some aspect of the system to latch onto and make that the hill you die on, be it turning everything that isn't a worthwhile combat into skill checks, plentiful out of combat healing that doesn't require magic, no vancian casting, non-casters being able to do anything that previous editions require magic to do, matter-of-fact rules elements that basically say "this does this, and it really doesn't care about corner cases", classes being funneled into a single role, or whatever sacred cow you hold near and dear to your vision of what D&D is.

It's worth noting that this sort of debate is not unique to 4e and surrounds every version of the game (just look at threads on this forum now about how the game should be changed to suit this play style or that). The only real difference is, the plug was pulled on 4e early, so it's detractors took that as evidence that they were right, the same way people who defend 5e are quick to point out how popular it is and how much money it makes.

That what happened to 4e may be a lot more complex* than "it failed" doesn't really matter to some people. To them, they won, 4e lost, 4e fans should just admit they were wrong.

*a quick look at any corporation will show that some really pants on head decisions are often made to hamstring their own success. Time Splitters 4 cancelled because "they couldn't decide on the box art"? New Coke? Kmart deciding they can directly compete with Wal-Mart? Bethesda deciding they can release games in half-finished states because "the modding community will fix it for us" (and then getting totally owned when modders turned up their noses at Starfield)? Completing filming of a movie and not even releasing it, despite the fact if it flops, you can recoup the costs from insurance and write it off in your taxes? Getting fooled into re-releasing a flop because of online buzz ("It's Morbin' time!"). Tanking your own blockbuster movie which is intended to start a franchise because you refuse to commit to decent marketing ("John Carter" comes to mind), et. al.