Confirm or Deny: D&D4e would be going strong had it not been titled D&D

[The Crimson Binome]

Someone who was a cat scratch away from death could bounce back to full health in a week!

It doesn't really matter if they could be back in a week. Because a week is too long to rest, in practical terms, it meant that the actual healing was done with magic. And since magic is what actually recovers the vast majority of HP, that means we're free to describe it as grievous wounds that would have killed a lesser mortal.

The theoretical natural healing rates of early D&D compared to 4E are not as different as some people like to imagine. The real difference is in practicality, and visibility. Characters in 4E actually​ recover their HP naturally, through short and long rests.

Again, it is clearly nonphysical that a human being, through doing nothing more than killing enemies and stealing treasures, could become more physically durable than a horse.

It is not even remotely unbelievable that a mythic hero of legend, who has saved countless kingdoms and slain terrifying giant monsters, should be more durable than a mere horse. That's just common sense.

 

[billd91]

See, the problem is that the concept of "HP" has always been schizoid. It has never had one consistent interpretation, and there is ample conflicting evidence for both things.

You've mentioned the biggest examples of irrefutable evidence that HP are meat: it's referred to as "Curing wounds," recovering them is called "healing," and losing all of them makes you die.

But you're ignoring or dismissing all the *equally* irrefutable evidence that they are not meat. While in the very earliest versions of D&D, you could gain (at best) 3 hp/24 hours bed rest, the most common "early edition" healing rule I've heard is "1 hp per level per day" (possibly with an extra point or two for solid 24 hours of rest and another for sumptuous food/high comfort surroundings/etc.); this essentially worked out to ~(hit die size/2) days to fully recover from 1 HP. Someone who was a cat scratch away from death could bounce back to full health in a week! Even with the 3/day (the ideal healing situation in very early D&D), most characters will be fully healed within two weeks (42 HP) even if they were almost dead. This is clearly nonphysical. Further, you have Gygax himself explicitly pointing out how ridiculous it is that a high-level Fighter--who is physically indistinguishable from a low-level Fighter--able to take as much damage as a draft horse (or perhaps even a TEAM of draft horses with good HP rolls!) *and still keep fighting.* Again, it is clearly nonphysical that a human being, through doing nothing more than killing enemies and stealing treasures, could become more physically durable than a horse.

HP cannot be parsed. They just can't. The PURELY physical interpretation makes no sense, but the descriptions contradict a nonphysical interpretation. Since physical and nonphysical are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive, there is no possible interpretation. HP are HP. They model HP, they signify HP, and they communicate HP, and nothing else. Trying to analyze them any further--trying to say that they are meat or that they are not meat--is a fool's errand that will result in nothing but tears and people being equally adamant that they ABSOLUTELY MUST BE [actual wounds||grit and skill], and anyone else is just "willfully ignoring" the enormous preponderance of evidence to the contrary.

Is there some reason they aren't both? I'm not seeing a convincing argument hit points must be exclusively one or the other.

 

[pemerton]

In D&D, there's no real tension until a character is down to about 1/3 of their hitpoints.

straight-up soaking damage with hero points or a big pool of hit points, like high levels in other D&D editions, means that characters have nothing to fear from most enemies until they get down to their last few points. No doubt this is why early editions have all kinds of SoD effects; they bypass big hp pools, so that there's tension even before the characters get to the big dragon's den with only a few hp left.

Whereas having a relatively small pool of hp plus healing surges that can get a character in tip-top shape after a fight, or be used conditionally within a fight, means that even a first encounter with some goblin goons can be dangerous, even if the characters are at full hp and surges.

My experience with 4e matches what Tequila Sunrise says here. Namely, there can be tension even when a character is at or near full hit points, and that part of the design point of healing surges is to allow that tension to be part of the combat mechanics: PCs have fewer hp than comparable monsters, and tend to hit less hard until they draw on their rationed attack resources.

It's not uncommon for a PC in my game to be bloodied in the first round of combat; in our last session the fighter (highest hp in the party) took attacks from an elite and a solo and was knocked below zero in the first round. He used his recovery abilities (this being an epic-level game, he has a ring which lets him return to life) to come back on his next turn. The invoker/wizard was reduced to zero in the next round, having thrown himself into harm's way in order to dominate the two enemies; the ranger-cleric had to revive him with a Healing Word.

I think that this is the sort of tension that Tequila Sunrise is talking about.

I finally GET what kind of a game is in there, trying to come out its shell, but it's hampered by the legacy D&D tropes, the poor written presentation, the terrible delve format adventures, and the odd problematic power or two. Wow, this is a very strange feeling.......I totally GET it. And wow, I totally GET why pemerton and Manbearcat defend it, because D&D 3 and earlier really CAN'T provide that kind of experience. Frankly you'd be better off going to the OSR to get that play experience than anything that's "actual D&D." Not because the mechanics are any BETTER for it than D&D, but most of the OSR stuff has shed a lot of the detritus of 1e to make it easier to play.

4e answers a "yes" to all of these questions:

• Is it pushing the stakes of the narrative?
• Do the mechanics point the characters towards their own individual stakes and narratives?
• Do the mechanics allow the players to have some narrative control over the "heroism" of their character?
• Does the action at the table drive the players to view the "heroics" of their characters as a necessary part of the fiction?
• Does the system have easy enough preparation to allow the GM to manage encounters in such a way that the focus of play remains on the framed scenes and the stakes at hand?

Wow you guys, how the heck have you put up with it all this time??? Don't you just want to go back and SHOOT the 4e designers for trying to shoehorn this round peg of innovative, progressive style of play into an old D&D square peg? Or do you like the fact that it's still kind of / sort of running on a D&D framework?

I discovered this interesting edit to your post upthread.

I'm not sure what the "shoehorning" is that you have in mind. Yes, 4e has D&D tropes (to hit + damage; hit points + healing; classes + levels), but these aren't per se a problem for me. As I see it, 4e puts these tropes to work in a way that realises the best that is inherent in them:

* The combat system combines the non-abstract movement and positioning of 3E (contrast the abstract nature of AD&D positioning in its 1 minute rounds) with the abstraction of to-hit and damage rolls advocated by Gygax, plus a condition-infliction system that creates a parallel element of tactics and tension in combat to straight hit point attrition (similar to the old SoD aspects of the game that [MENTION=40398]Tequila Sunrise[/MENTION] mentioned) but (i) they are not confined to magic-uses and (ii) they are no longer SoD in a literal sense;

* The hit points and healing fully embrace the "mojo" conception of hit points set out by Gygax in his AD&D rulebooks: psychic damage, inspirational healing, taking permanent afflictions out of the hp system altogether, etc;

* The XP system and the levelling system are turned from a way of granting power in a competitive gaming context (which is Ggaxian skilled play) into a way of pacing the growth of the game and the gameworld in line with the "story of D&D", from heroic but "ordinary" characters who save villages from goblins, to epic near-gods who battle demon lords in orer to determine the fate of the cosmos.​

These aren't things I'm having to "put up with". These are reasons for playing the game.

That's not to say that 4e is the only game for me. I used to post that, when my 4e game finished, I wanted to start a Burning Wheel game. That game started around 6 months ago, due to quorum issues with a few 4e sessions, and hopefully will keep going more regularly once the 4e game comes to its conclusion (at a guess, some time this year).

But 4e offers things that BW doesn't (monster-slaying, cosmological fantasy) just as BW offers things that 4e doesn't (much more personally-oriented, political/social fantasy). The things that 4e offers are the things that I've always looked for from D&D, so for me it's not about shedding legacy tropes so much as realising legacy aspirations.

 

[pemerton]

I do think it worth noting that while hit points have always been somewhat variable as to specific interpretation (ie. where are you hurt), they have also always been primarily linked to actual physical wounds, albeit in a general, non-maiming (and slightly unrealistic way). (So no one rests a hand back on, but nobody loses their hands either short of vorpal weapons or nasty traps and DM say-so, but if they do lose a hand, regeneration can put it back on.)

I dispute the "always", at least as a generalisation. Perhaps "always" for some, but not "always" for everybody.

In his DMG (p 61), Gygax explains that "hit points are not actually a measure of physical damage, by and large, as far as characters (and some other creatures) are concerned" and hence "the location of hits and the type of damage caused are not germane to them". (By "type of damage" Gygax doesn't mean cold vs fire vs piercing, but rather types of injury such as "sprains, breaks, and dislocations": p 61, 1st paragraph.)

This is reiterated down the page - "Damage scored to characters or certain monsters is actually not substantially physical - a mere nick or scratch . . . it is a matter of wearing away the endurance, the luck, the magical protections" - and comes up again on pp 81 and 111, where he says that "The so called damage is the expenditure of favor from deities, luck, skill, and perhaps a scratch" and that "the accumulation of hit points . . . represents the aid supplied by supernatural forces."

Gygax also links this, on the same page, to the range of decision-making options the game provides: "Combat is a common pursuit in the vast majority of adventures, and the participants in the campaign [ie the players] deserve a chance to exercise intelligent choice during such confrontations. As hit points dwindle they can opt to break off the encounter and attempt to flee. With complex combat systems which . . . feature hit location, special damage, and so on, either this option is severely limited or the rules are highly slanted towards favoring the player characters".
The thought is that a genuine system of injuries would eliminate this choice, because a player whose character was injured would not be able to have his/her PC escape combat even if s/he wanted to (due to the physical impediments suffered by the character).

I know that not everyone played hit points in accordance with the quotes I've provided, but it was an interpretation of hit points that was extent at least from 1979 (when the DMG was published), and it expressly denies any link between hit point loss and actual physical injury, "until the last handful of hit points are considered". This is the interpretation of hit points that 4e draws upon and develops.

There ar two main differences, as I see it, in 4e compared to AD&D run with mojo hit points. First, rather than focusing on "the last handful of hit points" as the locus of physical injury, focuses on the resolution of the "dying" state and death saving throws to determine whether the blow that led to zero hit points was a serious physical wound (that killed) or not (a mere swoon from which the character recovers). This is also manifested in the fact that a 4e character who recovers from 0 hp is back at full capacity (like Frodo after being "stabbed" by the troll) whereas in 1st ed AD&D that character is physically debilitated until s/he rests or receives magical healing beyond mere hit point restoration. (In the DMG this is a heal spell; Unearthed Arcana added the death's door spell.) I believe that both AD&D 2nd ed and 3E retained the AD&D 1st ed notion that losing the last handful of hp signals serious physical injury, while doing away with the recovery requirements for regaining consciousness; to me this is a move towards the sort of theoritecal incoherence that [MENTION=6790260]EzekielRaiden[/MENTION] describes, which - as [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION] has described - is resolved in practice by virtually all recovery being magical.

Second, 4e doesn't emphasise retreat and pursuit in the ways that Gygax's AD&D does. Rather, the decision points in 4e, which are facilitated by an absence of a mechanical "death spiral" resulting from treating hit point loss as genuine physical injury, are about (i) the unlocking of healing surges during combat, and (ii) the deployment of rationed action resources (attacks, moves, etc).

Cure Light Wounds, et.al. all refer to "wounds" which refers to the fact the character has been wounded.

They also refer to wounds that are "light", "serious" and "critical", although as is well known a Cure Light Wound will restore to full health the typical human who has suffered any injury short of one that causes death or unconsciousness, while Cure Critical Wounds will not restore to full health a Conanesque hero who has taken a few scratches and bruises that are manifestly well short of a critical wound.

Hence why some of us regard those spell labels as being less than literal in their meaning.

A third difference in 4e from AD&D is it's adoption of fully proportional healing, but while I'm a big fan I think this is more of a technical tweak than a significant gameplay departure from Gygaxian AD&D, when compared to the first two differences that I mentioned.

It's probably also worth noting that 4e does retain some legacy terminology from AD&D: hit point recovery is still called "healing", "regeneration" etc although it is not literally that. The "dying" state is given that label, although - if the character is revived - then it turns out s/he was never actually dying at all (so "dying" is really a metagame label - there is a chance, by the game rules, that this character will die - rather than an ingame label). The cleric's surgeless healing dailies are called Cure X Wounds (depending on how many surges worth of healing they permit).

These might be the sorts of legacy things that [MENTION=85870]innerdude[/MENTION] had in mind in the edited post upthread. Being mere labels, they don't both me. (Any more than, playing AD&D, I fussed very much about the healing spell names.)

 

[Connorsrpg]

Where is the option: "It would never have been anywhere near as popular if it was not called D&D"?

Meaning, if it was a core game with another name, I imagine it would be a small indie game right now. And most people would be playing D&D.

 

[Wicht]

Pemerton - You know, when I state up front that I already know what Gygax said about a thing, there is really no need to quote him back to me in order to demonstrate what it was he said.

Also, I might note, just for the record at large, when I begin by pointing out that hit points are slightly unrealistic, there is no need for others to then turn around and try to explain to me why hit points are unrealistic.

I get Gygax's written point, and I understand that hit points (and healing) are unrealistic when applied to any real world experiences.

I also know that terms shape expectations and that for the entirety of my exposure to Dungeons and Dragons, and a variety of different players, hit points have always primarily (but not exclusively or mortally) represented wounds and the ability to keep physically pushing one's self to keep going. This is neither right nor wrong, it just is, and I half suspect that Gygax himself, in actual play, likely did it the same way most of us do, describing it as (and he even uses these words) nicks, scrapes and minor injuries - up until the last shot finally lays a person low.

 

[gamerprinter]

Yeah, I've never considered hit points as representing stamina or some other thing than actual damage. While HP certainly doesn't emulate reality, as a 40 year old working mechanic, I am perfectly fine with using it and don't need nor want a new paradigm to handle combat damage.

 

[Bedrockgames]

This touches on something I like to call Drift (when how people play naturally shifts away from the text). I see this all the time when I design games and run campaigns or do play tests. We make a mechanic, then over time shift away from what the text says and need to figure out why before deciding if the shift is an improvement (or just a natural move that is hard to stop) or a bad habit.

With D&D I think there was a lot of drift and it varied considerably from group to group (particularly around things like HP). Back in the early 2000s I remember how differently different groups approached parts of the game (which was true back when I was playing 2E as well). With something like HP, the problem I think they ran into was Drift. It would be fine if D&D was the kind of game where they could update it however they want and people will accept any change. But when you have tons of existing campaigns being run a particular way, when you suddenly present HP in a way that you really can't get around the way they are presented (Whereas with AD&D you could easily conceive of HP in a number of ways, regardless of what the HP definition in the book was at the time). So much of 4E seems engineered around the Definition of HP it puts forward, that I found it very jarring.

I think another part of this that gets lost is, while HP has always been an abstraction that contained many things (everything from physical damage to will, to energy to luck) you can never really remove all of those from a single HP. It was just difficult mentally. HP definitely would break down under scrutiny. No one really objects to that. But it was very hard (at least for me) to not essentially see them as being physical damage, because physical damage was always at least part of the equation. And just the way the game worked, with weapons doing different amounts of damage, seemed to naturally lead to seeing HP loss as being harmed by a sword slash or smashed by a mace.

 

[spinozajack]

Once again, I think you are missing one possibility: that none of that surge expenditure is about healing meat. It's all about regaining grit/mojo.

That's not an option for most of the time, because PCs are often narratively gouged, trampled, stomped, stabbed, cut, sliced, diced, fall down stairs into a pit of broken glass and snakes. Do you seriously expect me to believe that you can wipe away all those things as if they didn't happen just by saying so? How do you expect to keep the narration consistent, when going below half health was referred to as "bloodied"? So you're bloodied, and it only takes 5 minutes to go back to full health? Without magic? Really?

The option you are referring to is gamism. It's saying you don't care about the narrative being consistent. If the player loses grit / mojo, why did the DM just describe my player getting crushed by that boulder and knocking him unconscious?

HP loss models many different types of very bad things happening to PCs, and losing grit / mojo is not at all serious. You can't just handwave away inconsistent narrative effects of different game mechanics (HP loss vs restoration) in a game about narrative. In effect, you are saying HP loss means one thing, but regaining HP is something else.

So if HP restoration means restoring grit or the will to live, how come HP loss comes about when your PC gets stomped and rendered unconscious?

4e HP rules was an inconsistent, incoherent mess. It was the edition that explicitly called it being "bloodied" and then you're now handwaving that away as being "grit". Sure, whatever.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

That's not an option for most of the time, because PCs are often narratively gouged, trampled, stomped, stabbed, cut, sliced, diced, fall down stairs into a pit of broken glass and snakes. Do you seriously expect me to believe that you can wipe away all those things as if they didn't happen just by saying so? How do you expect to keep the narration consistent, when going below half health was referred to as "bloodied"? So you're bloodied, and it only takes 5 minutes to go back to full health? Without magic? Really?

It's just a word. You're not actually bloodied just because you have the condition, any more than an ooze is actually prone because it has that condition. If you accept the basic premise of 4E combat narrative - that a "hit" isn't always a hit, and "damage" isn't always damage - then there's no reason why "bloodied" should be a sticking point. I mean, you can still bloody a construct, after all.

The option you are referring to is gamism. It's saying you don't care about the narrative being consistent. If the player loses grit / mojo, why did the DM just describe my player getting crushed by that boulder and knocking him unconscious?

You can actually work a fairly consistent narrative out of 4E if you play HP as almost entirely mojo. In that case, though, it's your DM's fault for describing the boulder as crushing the character (or describing the sword as stabbing the character) rather than the more-consistent narrative where the character narrowly dodges out of the way.

It may not be an entirely satisfying narrative, of course - after all, it's a system where the primary effect of hitting someone with a sword is not that the person becomes injured - but that's a matter of preference, rather than consistency.