Disappointed in 4e

[Raven Crowking]

Well, I think it should work that way. I don't play 4E anymore, so it really doesn't matter. 4E just doesn't feel like the fantasy RPG it's supposed to be. It works okay as a miniatures skirmish game, but is completely lacking as an RPG.

Then we pretty much agree here.

 

[Arnwyn]

Oh, of course. But what you wrote was unclear.

Sorry!

Now we're talking about a particular level of "MMI"? That's a different story.

It's always () a "particular level". I don't do the whole extremes/black & white thing - especially on a D&D messageboard. (P.S. Woo for acronyms!)

But my question to this is, when has this notion began that the DM is not in control of the game?
.
Isn't the point of an RPG to customize it to your group?

Never, AFAIC. I find it interesting you're seeing the things you're seeing. I can only shrug at your experiences, as they are alien to me. I totally agree with you that it's the point of an RPG to customize it to your group - and I haven't seen that change in any edition.

But in your own post, you yourself show the value in "RAW".

 

[Raven Crowking]

While I'm too lazy to go dig out a link to the post, RPG.net's Old Geezer - someone who is notable for having been in the late Gary Gygax's gaming group - once related that hit points were originally just a measure of how long people could stay in the fight. They'd tried a few other things and found none of them to be as fun as hit points, and since D&D at that point was mostly, to quote Old Geezer, them "making up that they thought would be fun", well...!

Really? Because a friend of my sister's husband's cousin said something else that I'm too lazy to look up.

I'll settle for what Gary wrote, thank you.

(It is notable, IMHO, that this argument didn't arise while he was alive to defend himself. )

Since then, it's quite possible people - including people developing D&D - have attached a deeper meaning to hit points than was originally present. It's not like copious designers' notes were available in those days, after all.

I would like to point to Exhibit A: The 1e DMG. If ever there was a compendium of copious designer's notes, this is it.

I would like to point to Exhibit B: Gary's contributions to Up on a Soapbox in The Dragon.

I would like to point to Exhibit C: Gary's contributions to this and other forums. Much of what Gary has written is collected in a single thread in dragonsfoot, which makes it easier to examine.

Gary left us more copious designer's notes than any designer to follow him.


RC

 

[Fifth Element]

Really? Because a friend of my sister's husband's cousin said something else that I'm too lazy to look up.

I'll settle for what Gary wrote, thank you.

You want me to type from page 82 again, don't you? Very well, here's what Mr. Gygax wrote.

"Why then the increase in hit points [from levelling]? Because these reflect both the actual physical ability to withstand damage...and a commensurate increase in such areas as skill in combat and similar life-or-death situations, the "sixth sense" which warns the individual of some otherwise unforeseen events, sheer luck, and the fantastic provisions of magical protections and/or divine protection."

Now, later in the passage is the implication that each "hit" does inflict some amount of physical damage, however it may only be a scratch.

Given the number of intangible, non-physical sources of hit points enumerated by Mr. Gygax, I think the contention that morale cannot possibly make up part of hit points is indefensible.

The hit point system is abstract. You may find it silly that a creature could be defeated by "morale damage" alone, but that is a consequence of an abstract system. Corner cases will seem strange. But the vast majority of the time, the damage caused to a creature will not come from a single source, and the abstract system works well.

I think I see how you interpret the DMG passages to mean that hit points only represents physical damage. But I don't think that interpretation is obvious or a given, considering that the passage discusses the maximum capacity a person would have to withstand actual physical damage, and that "[t]he balance of accrued hit points are those which fall into the non-physical areas already detailed." This spells out in quite plain language that some of a character's hit points do not represent the physical capacity to withstand damage.

 

[Greg K]

It's an odd little irony that the more realistic Damage Save was introduced for four-color superheroes.

And, yet it is simple, elegant, and works well for supers and other genres.

 

[LostSoul]

I recall that I did so ad infinitum ad nauseum before, as did several other people, and have no need to do so again.

Okay.

Let's review:

[sblock]This looks like the first point in which you explain your contention:

However, in 4e, when you take hit point damage, you cannot immediately tell what that damage represents in-world. If you receive magical healing later, it might have represented real damage, but if the Warlord chooses to make it so, it might have represented battle fatigue or low morale. The changes to hit points change them from representing something happening now to something that only happens later and is retroactively "true" in terms of the "in world" story. You can no longer tell the story as it unfolds.

Here is your first example that you give to back this up:

4e: Fighter with 10 hp takes 8 hp damage. This might be a wound, or it might not be. Neither the player nor the DM knows if it is a wound at the time it is taken because, within context of the in-world story, if the fighter recieves magical healing later it was a wound, but a second wind means that it was not.

Here I challenge that:

That is not true. I can say that a Fighter gets hit for 2 hp at the start of the day, when he's fresh with all his surges, and describe it as a brutal wound to his gut.

That wound can stick around as long as I want it to. If I don't feel like describing the wound magically healing via a second wind, healing surge via a short rest, I don't have to. In other words, the wound is there if I say it is, and it's not there if I say it's not.

What the hp mechanics tell me is how much fight someone has left in them. They don't dictate anything else, and I'm glad for that. I can use them in whatever way works best in my game, in my world, in my story.

Here you reply:

And what it is remains in force until future actions invalidate the "in world" logic of what it once was. It was a gut wound, because that's what I wanted it to mean at the time, then I had a healing surge, so now it was never a gut wound.

But you never say why I have to ret-con the gut wound; you just say, "it never was."

And here you say:

And, therein lies the flaw in your argument. When your story is divorced from the mechanics, and those mechanics have no objective meaning in the game world, no matter how much in-world logic your story may have that meaning is not derived from the mechanics. The mechanics simulate nothing outside of the game itself. You just choose to pretend that they do.

So I say:

The story is not divorced from the mechanics: the hp mechanism helps resolve conflicts. It tells us when one party can no longer carry on the fight.

The in-game meaning is objective and it is derived from the mechanics. We know that the characters involved lose more and more ability to fight as their hp are depleted. How that depletion occurs is subjective and I have to decide how to describe it in a way that works for me.

To which:

Keep telling yourself that. When 5e or 6e rolls around, and claims to "fix" the quantum wounding problem, we'll see what people think then.

I don't find that point ("Keep telling yourself that") compelling.


Later on, we have another example:

Conversely, in 4e, when I take hit point damage, I don't know what it represents at the time I take it. If I declare it is an actual wound, and I use a healing surge later, I am potentially stuck with either (a) my wound having disappeared without having actually been healed, or (b) claiming to still have a wound that has no game meaning. If, on the other hand, I declare that it represents no wound, and I have magical healing later, I am potentially stuck with the healing of a wound that doesn't exist.

Now you admit that you don't have to ret-con it (option b).

You respond to an example I post here:

What I am not okay with is Lance taking a hit, declaring it a major wound, then getting a second wind and the wound goes away. I prefer a game in which action has consequences. It is the way in which we deal with those consequences, to me, which is the most interesting aspect of play.

To which I reply:

The wound only "goes away" if the player (well, DM in 4e) describes it going away. He doesn't have to. All we know is that his staying power is reduced. Any colour that we describe must stay true to that, but that's our only constraint.

Can you tell me - or give me a hypothetical example - where in play I'd be forced to describe a wound going away? Or any quantum wounding situation?

There are consequences to the action - he got hit, he lost hit points, he used a healing surge. Granted, those consequences go away after an extended rest, but this is D&D we're talking about.

How does this not count as a consequence?

Unfortunately, you didn't reply or give an example, maybe because you were talking with Hypersmurf.

Later on, I ask:

I've never noticed a single instance of it in my games.

RC, do you have an example from a game where you ran into this problem?

Which you don't reply to.[/sblock]

I'll ask again: do you have an example where one must ret-con wounds away?

 

[Fifth Element]

It is revisionist history to claim that hit points do not now, and have not always, meant, at least in part, "the number of pink elephants owned by the character". This is true in 1e, 2e, 3e, and 4e.

If you can show me a passage that specifies this is incorrect, I'd like to see it.

I can do that, since we have passages specifying what hit points represent, and none of them mention pink elephants.

But they do specify that some portion of a character's hit points represent non-physical things such as combat skill and experience and pure luck. See my last post. Which you apparently claim they do not.

 

[ExploderWizard]

The hit point system is abstract. You may find it silly that a creature could be defeated by "morale damage" alone, but that is a consequence of an abstract system. Corner cases will seem strange. But the vast majority of the time, the damage caused to a creature will not come from a single source, and the abstract system works well.

That may be, but if my character was ever reduced to 0 hp from Harsh Language then it would be time to retire and let heroes made of sterner stuff carry on the fight.

 

[Fifth Element]

That may be, but if my character was ever reduced to 0 hp from Harsh Language then it would be time to retire and let heroes made of sterner stuff carry on the fight.

The description of the Intimidate skill does not allow it to cause damage. DM fiat is required for that. It can force a bloodied target to surrender, but that's not the same thing as reducing it to 0 hp.

 

[mmadsen]

"However, the amount of damage 1 hit point represents is not on an absolute scale, but corresponds instead to the hit point total of the being hit."

The first 8-hp wound to a 10th level fighter has a different correspondance to his hit point total than does the last.

So, by "total" you meant "remaining"?

So the first attack is much less damaging than the Nth. That is exactly what the system was meant to do. [...] Both are 100% tangible. A nick and a sword through the guts are both 100% tangible.

My point was not that a nick was intangible. My point was that a sword blow that leaves a nick on a high-level fighter is doing negligible physical damage, equivalent to less than 1-hp damage on a first-level fighter. After all, he can take a dozen such hits before falling.

Since a high-level fighter's hit points are 90 percent intangible, we would expect attacks to do damage that was on average 90 percent intangible. (If the damage roll says 5 points, less than 1 point is physical damage.)

But we know that the last attack is going to be more than 10 percent tangible, because it's going to involve a crippling injury, just as if it had struck a lower-level fighter -- so, to average things out, the first attack must be even less than 10 percent tangible.

The point isn't that the physical nick is somehow not a tangible injury. It's that the five points of damage clearly don't represent five points of physical damage, because that's enough to cripple a healthy man.

The healing rules in 1e do a good job, but not the best possible job, of defining how damage is healed. I would recommend house ruling 1 hp per day per level, so that that first nick is healed after a night's rest.

Of course, if that first nick were simply morale, it would go away instantly as soon as the fighter rallied.

I'm not sure we can say how quickly intangible factors should "heal" -- because it's not clear what that might mean.

If hit points are a measure of skill, we might look at doubling hit points as halving the amount of physical damage one takes per attack. So, it's not really that skill gets used up, just that the accounting is easier if we add hit dice, rather than do division with each damage roll. I don't think that linearity holds, but it would imply healing a constant proportion of hit points across levels. However long it takes a first-level fighter to heal one hit point, it would take an Nth-level fighter to heal N hit points.

If hit points represent luck or divine favor, who's to say how they operate? I can easily see luck points that don't "heal" at all, or that need to be re-earned through heroic feats.

If hit points are a measure of fighting spirit, then they should go up and down with morale, which can shift rapidly.

If hit points represent extra effort, they should return with rest.

And if they're some mix? Who knows?