Disappointed in 4e

[pemerton]

However, it is the serious wound I have issues with. A week of bed rest, will allow one to recover from torn muscles and heavy bruising but if you get a couple of inches of steel shoved through you it will take more than a week before you are gadding about dirty dungeons.

<snip>

That is, I suppose, why I am happier with the 4e view of hit points because they are a little more abstract.

In all cases, I think the solution must be to refrain from narrating injuries as "inches of steel shoved deepd into vital areas". As Lost Soul points out in another heroic post, it is important to avoid narration that produces absurd results (and this is as true in AD&D as it is in 4e).

In all previous editions of D&D, the nature of hit points and healing was such that one could describe a wound when the damage was rolled by comparing the damage done to the amount of hit points the character had remaining.

If you attempt to do this in 4e, you have the sudden problem of "mundane" healing closing gaping wounds, in any case where (say) a character is dropped to 0 then "talked back to full".

<snip>

If wounds are healed magically, they must have been wounds. If wounds are healed by "talking them away" they must not have been wounds.

The obvious solutions here are not to narrate absurdities. This solution has two elements: not narrating non-fatal wounds as fatal (the rules for HeroWars/Quest have a good discussion of this); and not narrating recovery of fighting capacity as healing, but rather as the regaining of will/grit/determination.

The point is that it is not necessary to close the wound in order to keep fighting. D&D has always assumed that it is possible to keep fighting despite one's wounds (because it has never implemented penalties to physical action as a consequence of hit point loss). Thus, when a Warlord offers "kind words of encouragement", the player should explain how his/her PC regains the will to fight despite the fact that s/he remains wounded.

Is this the same as AD&D? There is one difference I can see: in AD&D I think it is assumed that the recovery of hit points correlates to the healing of injury (though as Mmadsen and Lacyon have pointed out upthread, this is all very confused by the names of the spells, and the fact that exactly the same magic as will heal a 10th level character from 85 to 90 hp - a trivial wound - can also heal a 1st level character from 1 to 6 hp - a much more considerable wound). In 4e, however, the recovery of hit points correlates not to the healing of injuries but rather to the recovery of the capacity to fight, which may or may not involve the healing of injury.

EDIT: I see that Lacyon made the same point as I make in my last paragraph a page or two upthread.

 

[der_kluge]

*sigh*

Leave it to a bunch of D&D geeks to turn a perfectly awesome 4e-bashing thread into a debate about the abstraction of hit points.

 

[Vyvyan Basterd]

Vorpal sword?

Sword of Sharpness?

I don't recall the actual penalties for harmed limbs, but recall it somewhere. I mean you got vorpal weapons that could be used against you, there is going to have to be something unless the cleric has sewing NWP or something.

What is the penalty for being on fire? But you can still attack without one when engulfed in flames, it even adds to your damage!

Silliness overrules common sense as always of course.

Thanks for providing examples of Wounds != Hit Points. Both of the swords mentioned bypass hit points. Loss of your head (usually) kills you. Loss of a limb means you can't use that limb.

The penalty for being on fire is that you take continuous damage. There are Wounding weapons in 3E that cause either Con damage or continuous hit point loss. But there is nothing in the base combat rules that causes a Wound with associated penalties. Wounds beyond these corner cases are narrated by the DM and/or Player.

One person's Common Sense = Another's Silliness. Twenty-five years of gaming has proven that to me time and time again.

 

[Alzrius]

Having just read over the last few pages of this thread, I think Raven Crowking is making an excellent point.

I personally found this a very difficult topic to discuss, because it required explaining some assumptions about the interaction of fluff with crunch that I'd always taken as a given up until now. Looking back over this thread, that seems to be the case for several people, as there's a lot of difficulty and misunderstanding in explaining how to concretely represent the abstract nature of hit points and damage.

The point that RC seems to be making is that in pre-4e models, hit points represent physical health - ergo, a character that lost hit points was taking physical damage. How bad that damage was overall is based around what I call the "damage percentage," that the wound's severity is equal to the percentage of the hit point loss it deals versus the character's total hit points.

For example, Character A with 6 hit points total that takes 6 hit points of damage from a single attack has just taken 100% damage percentage - he has been killed/is dying from a single attack. Inversely, Character B with 60 hit points who takes 6 hit points damage has suffered 10% damage percentage - he's taken a wound roughly one-tenth as great as it would take to kill a person.

Now, why the latter character took less damage percentage than the former character, despite both having taken the same amount of hit point damage, is where the fluff interacts with the crunch. The DM describes the latter as being a relatively minor wound, such as a deep but non-fatal cut, whereas the former is a mortal blow, such as having been skewered through the heart.

By itself, this system seems to work, however, as was noted, magical healing throws a monkey wrench in things. Why is it that a cure light wounds that restores 6 hit points can restore Character A from his dying state (assuming 0 hit points is dying, rather than dead) to perfect health, but - if Character B were to be reduced to 0 hit points - only bring Character B back up to 10% of his total health?

The problem here is that the fluff interpretation of the crunch is much narrower for healing than for damage. Damage can be described all sorts of different ways, which is why 6 hit points of damage believably be called a skewering, or a relatively minor cut. Healing, however, presents itself as a constant in terms of its effects, especially when it's magical - healing isn't different things to different people; if it can bring one person from dying to being fine, why not another person?

The solution to this, which I believe is what RC was talking about, is to tweak the description of precisely how magical healing works. The idea here is that the healing energy (the hit points the spell grants) primarily go towards whatever wound pushed the character over 100% damage percentage, and only after that start to heal other wounds.

So how would that work from a fluff point of view? Let's look back at Characters A and B.

Character A had 6 hit points, and then lost all 6 in one blow - a fluff perspective would be that he suffered an immediately lethal wound, such as being stabbed through the heart. A cure light wounds that restores all 6 is then expending all of its energy piecing his heart back together (as well as the muscle and skin around it, etc.) basically undoing that most lethal of wounds. The spell expends all of its energy doing that, with none left over for other wounds...but since Character A has no other wounds, he's now exactly as he was prior to having been stabbed.

Character B, on the other hand, had 60 hit points, but is now down to 0. Maybe he lost them all at once from a single severe wound, such as suffering a red dragon's breath weapon that inflicted 60 hit points of damage and fried him to a crisp, or maybe he lost them piecemeal, such as from multiple sword slashes, the last one of which stabbed him through the heart just like Character A. When Character B receives the cure light wounds for 6 hit points back, the spell is doing the same thing...it's healing the worst wounds first. If it was the sword slashes, then it's healed the one that pierced his heart; if it was the red dragon's breath, then it healed the part of the fire damage that killed him (e.g. the flames' damage to his organs, rather than to his skin). Either way, for Character B the magic worked the same way that it did for Character A; it used all of its energy healing his most deadly wounds first - at that point, the spell is expended, and his other wounds still remain.

That's how hit points worked back in pre-4e games (for most people, at least).

This changed in 4e because, as someone else said, 4e doesn't use hit points to measure physical vitality anymore. Now it uses them to measure combat effectiveness. This is a problem because it discards the "damage percentage" paradigm of fluff. Now hit point loss can be either physical damage, or it can be loss of morale, or anything else that effectively causes a person to be a less adequate combatant, until at 0 hit points they are unable to continue fighting, whether they're dead, demoralized, or something else.

The reason this doesn't work very well is because now, hit point loss has no inherent fluff to it, but regaining hit points does. A spell that restores hit points is healing physical damage; a healing surge restoring hit points is the character raising their morale. This means that the DM can describe hit point loss as physical, and the PC can then receive a morale-boosting healing surge to restore hit points, or vice versa, which makes no sense from a fluff perspective.

As Kamikaze Midget once said, there's now a wrought-iron fence made of tigers between the fluff and the crunch of the game that wasn't there before, and trying to get around that fence to merge the fluff and the crunch back together isn't fun.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Exactly so, with the caveats that (1) the CLW wouldn't put our 6hp fighter back into the trim in 1e....he'd still need bed rest and (2) the 10% loss of hit points could mean something far less than 10% of a wound that would kill someone. The higher your hp total, the less any damage means; this is a geometric rather than an arithmatic progression.


RC

 

[Vyvyan Basterd]

The reason this doesn't work very well is because now, hit point loss has no inherent fluff to it, but regaining hit points does. A spell that restores hit points is healing physical damage; a healing surge restoring hit points is the character raising their morale. This means that the DM can describe hit point loss as physical, and the PC can then receive a morale-boosting healing surge to restore hit points, or vice versa, which makes no sense from a fluff perspective.

As Kamikaze Midget once said, there's now a wrought-iron fence made of tigers between the fluff and the crunch of the game that wasn't there before, and trying to get around that fence to merge the fluff and the crunch back together isn't fun.

I think you are ignoring some valid examples on the other side of the argument. Hit point loss in 4E can have the same fluff it had in previous editions. What has changed is the way characters are able to regain hit points. The interaction between damage and healing makes perfect sense to me and I've given examples of how it works for me.

And thanks for declaring that using one's imagination to merge fluff and crunch as badwrongfun. The real trick is that since the first days of D&D players had to reconcile the gap between the fluff and the crunch. People in this thread have pointed out the glaring inconsistencies that we have come to take for granted over the history of the game. 4E added new crunch and those of us playing the game have to find new ways to mesh fluff and crunch. Just because there are new "wrought iron fences" between fluff and crunch doesn't mean that there weren't before.

 

[Raven Crowking]

And thanks for declaring that using one's imagination to merge fluff and crunch as badwrongfun.

Gods of the Interweb forbid that anyone can point out a problem without being accused, by those who don't experience or who ignore the problem, of calling the thing with the problem badwrongfun.

1e has a falling damage problem.

That doesn't make 1e wrongbadfun.


RC

 

[pemerton]

The point that RC seems to be making is that in pre-4e models, hit points represent physical health - ergo, a character that lost hit points was taking physical damage. How bad that damage was overall is based around what I call the "damage percentage," that the wound's severity is equal to the percentage of the hit point loss it deals versus the character's total hit points.

For example, Character A with 6 hit points total that takes 6 hit points of damage from a single attack has just taken 100% damage percentage - he has been killed/is dying from a single attack. Inversely, Character B with 60 hit points who takes 6 hit points damage has suffered 10% damage percentage - he's taken a wound roughly one-tenth as great as it would take to kill a person.

Now, why the latter character took less damage percentage than the former character, despite both having taken the same amount of hit point damage, is where the fluff interacts with the crunch. The DM describes the latter as being a relatively minor wound, such as a deep but non-fatal cut, whereas the former is a mortal blow, such as having been skewered through the heart.

The problem with the above is that Character B was killed by being skewered through the heart, the same as Character A. In the narration, the earlier damage did not contribute to Character B's death except indirectly, by making him less able to dodge the killing blow.

So why, given that both suffered the same (near-)fatal wound, is it so much harder to heal Character B to full health than Character A - requiring either a lot more time, or a lot more magic? Your narration of damage implies that it is not a cumulation of nicks and grazes that kills B, but rather that these wear him down so that eventually he dies the same death as A. But the healing system strongly suggests that B did die through attrition, and thus that healing B just requires restoring more "meat" than is required to restore A.

Damage can be described all sorts of different ways, which is why 6 hit points of damage believably be called a skewering, or a relatively minor cut. Healing, however, presents itself as a constant in terms of its effects, especially when it's magical - healing isn't different things to different people; if it can bring one person from dying to being fine, why not another person?

The solution to this, which I believe is what RC was talking about, is to tweak the description of precisely how magical healing works. The idea here is that the healing energy (the hit points the spell grants) primarily go towards whatever wound pushed the character over 100% damage percentage, and only after that start to heal other wounds.

<snip>

When Character B receives the cure light wounds for 6 hit points back, the spell is doing the same thing...it's healing the worst wounds first. If it was the sword slashes, then it's healed the one that pierced his heart; if it was the red dragon's breath, then it healed the part of the fire damage that killed him (e.g. the flames' damage to his organs, rather than to his skin). Either way, for Character B the magic worked the same way that it did for Character A; it used all of its energy healing his most deadly wounds first - at that point, the spell is expended, and his other wounds still remain.

This makes no sense to me. Cure Light Wounds heals a (near-)fatal wound, but healing all of Character B's nicks and grazes requires Cure Critical Wounds? At best, the spells are badly misnamed. At worst, your model for hit points has broken down.

And the problem arises with natural healing, also. Consider Characters A and B after they take 5 hp and 15 hp of damage respectively. Character A is badly injured - any blow will kill him. Character B has suffered only some minor wounds. Yet Character A will heal to full strength in less than a week, while Character B will require more than a fortnight to heal. That makes no sense to me, unless we assume that hit points are measuring something other than "meat" - eg some spiritual prowess or luck that Character B takes time to regain.

Of course, you could change the natural healing rules to be more like 3E. But that is hardly a defence of the consistency of the AD&D hit point mechanics under your interpretation of them.

4e doesn't use hit points to measure physical vitality anymore. Now it uses them to measure combat effectiveness.

<snip>

The reason this doesn't work very well is because now, hit point loss has no inherent fluff to it, but regaining hit points does. A spell that restores hit points is healing physical damage; a healing surge restoring hit points is the character raising their morale.

Why do you say that magical healing in 4e is healing physical damage? If the damage taken is all psychic damage, for example, or is all the untyped damage inflicted by the Dread Wraith's hideous gaze, than the healing spell is presumably raising morale also.

This means that the DM can describe hit point loss as physical, and the PC can then receive a morale-boosting healing surge to restore hit points, or vice versa, which makes no sense from a fluff perspective.

Only if the GM or the player are playing poorly.

As Kamikaze Midget once said, there's now a wrought-iron fence made of tigers between the fluff and the crunch of the game that wasn't there before, and trying to get around that fence to merge the fluff and the crunch back together isn't fun.

I didn't understand this when KM said it, and I still don't.

Look, if 4e's mechanics were novel, and no one had ever RPGed with them before, then I could understand all this angst. But 4e's mechanics are old hat. They have existed for years in games like HeroWars/Quest, The Dying Earth, etc. These are not obscure games written by non-entities. These are major games written by the likes of Greg Stafford and Robin Laws, and they are full of discussions of how to narrate things like 4e hit point loss and healing in such a way as to avoid contradiction or the need to retcon. LostSoul in his posts has also given numerous examples and explanations.

If you narrate an injury as physical, and then when a warlord heals you you don't know what to say without retconning, that is your problem as a player. As LostSoul and I have posted, the narration here is quite easy: "Despite my wound I grit my teeth and go on."

And if you narrate an injury as a severed limb or something of that sort, which you think can't be teeth-gritted through, then you are no worse off than you ever were in D&D, because no Cure X Wounds or Heal spell has ever been able to heal a severed limb - it has always required Regeneration (in 3E this also seems to be required for the healing of ruined organs - like a heart pierced by a sword, presumably). So if you as a GM were in the habit of inflicting non-healable wounds on your PCs when playing AD&D - not something supported by the damage mechanics - then I'm sure you can go ahead and do the same in 4e.

 

[Alzrius]

The problem with the above is that Character B was killed by being skewered through the heart, the same as Character A. In the narration, the earlier damage did not contribute to Character B's death except indirectly, by making him less able to dodge the killing blow.

So why, given that both suffered the same (near-)fatal wound, is it so much harder to heal Character B to full health than Character A - requiring either a lot more time, or a lot more magic?

Because Character B has more wounds (or a much more severe single wound) than character A does. Assuming both were killed by sword blows, consider the number of hits each took. Character A died from one hit through the heart; Character B died of that also, but suffered a number of other wounds in addition.

Healing magic, under the fluff interpretation I proposed, is going to heal the worst (fluff) damage first. The CLW's mechanics is to bring both characters back above 0 hp - the fluff is that this totally heals Character A's one and only wound, whereas it heals the same wound on Character B...still leaving him with a myriad number of other wounds, which will require more time or magic to heal.

Your narration of damage implies that it is not a cumulation of nicks and grazes that kills B, but rather that these wear him down so that eventually he dies the same death as A. But the healing system strongly suggests that B did die through attrition, and thus that healing B just requires restoring more "meat" than is required to restore A.

That the healing system suggests that is your interpretation of the fluff, though. I'll grant you that hit points for vitality do seem ablative, but the fluff is easily able to override the mild suggestion that the mechanics make in this case. There's no disconnect from suggesting that Characters A and B died of the same wound, with Character B being worn down to that point. The fluff I wrote for how healing works solves the problem you mentioned.

This makes no sense to me. Cure Light Wounds heals a (near-)fatal wound, but healing all of Character B's nicks and grazes requires Cure Critical Wounds? At best, the spells are badly misnamed. At worst, your model for hit points has broken down.

I'd say it's the former, but really it's not even that. Simply put, the spells aren't misnamed - that's just a misconception based on what the names sound like. Saying that a cure light wounds spell only cures "light wounds," as opposed to more serious ones, is silly.

The thing to keep in mind is that a CLW heals only the non-fatal wound, but nothing else. Had a cure critical wounds been applied instead, it would have healed the near-fatal wound first, just like the CLW, but then would have kept going and healed the lesser wounds as well. The idea is that all healing magic starts with the worst wounds (those that brought the character to 0 hp and below) and works backwards from there.

And the problem arises with natural healing, also. Consider Characters A and B after they take 5 hp and 15 hp of damage respectively. Character A is badly injured - any blow will kill him. Character B has suffered only some minor wounds. Yet Character A will heal to full strength in less than a week, while Character B will require more than a fortnight to heal. That makes no sense to me, unless we assume that hit points are measuring something other than "meat" - eg some spiritual prowess or luck that Character B takes time to regain.

Of course, you could change the natural healing rules to be more like 3E. But that is hardly a defence of the consistency of the AD&D hit point mechanics under your interpretation of them.

It really seems like you negated your own point, here. The 3.5e natural healing mechanic solves this problem quite neatly. Higher-level characters heal more damage, which scales almost perfectly with the fact that they have more hit points in the first place. Problem solved.

Why do you say that magical healing in 4e is healing physical damage? If the damage taken is all psychic damage, for example, or is all the untyped damage inflicted by the Dread Wraith's hideous gaze, than the healing spell is presumably raising morale also.

Maybe it's just me, but that seems needlessly complex. So healing magic can heal not just physical wounds, but also raise a person's morale? Healing spells can make somebody feel more heartened if they've been intimidated?

I'm not saying a fluff justification isn't possible; I'm just saying that it's not very good.

Only if the GM or the player are playing poorly.

I'll grant you that a creative interpretation can probably fix almost any mechanics, but as I said, this seems to be needlessly difficult. I can understand "gritting your teeth and getting through it" for a Healing Surge to restore hit points that were previously narrated as a ruptured lung...but that's not temporary in the way that that'd work - the character has just permanently ignored what was described as a serious wound through sheer willpower.

I didn't understand this when KM said it, and I still don't.

Look, if 4e's mechanics were novel, and no one had ever RPGed with them before, then I could understand all this angst. But 4e's mechanics are old hat. They have existed for years in games like HeroWars/Quest, The Dying Earth, etc. These are not obscure games written by non-entities. These are major games written by the likes of Greg Stafford and Robin Laws, and they are full of discussions of how to narrate things like 4e hit point loss and healing in such a way as to avoid contradiction or the need to retcon. LostSoul in his posts has also given numerous examples and explanations.

I'll admit that I don't play those games, and that I mostly skimmed over the last few pages of posts, but I think the central point remains. The new system of mingling the crunch and fluff of hit points is lopsided, and more difficult than it needs to be, at least compared to previous additions.

If you narrate an injury as physical, and then when a warlord heals you you don't know what to say without retconning, that is your problem as a player. As LostSoul and I have posted, the narration here is quite easy: "Despite my wound I grit my teeth and go on."

See above. This isn't the character forcing themselves forward for a few minutes; it's them no longer being troubled ever again by a serious wound.

And if you narrate an injury as a severed limb or something of that sort, which you think can't be teeth-gritted through, then you are no worse off than you ever were in D&D, because no Cure X Wounds or Heal spell has ever been able to heal a severed limb - it has always required Regeneration (in 3E this also seems to be required for the healing of ruined organs - like a heart pierced by a sword, presumably). So if you as a GM were in the habit of inflicting non-healable wounds on your PCs when playing AD&D - not something supported by the damage mechanics - then I'm sure you can go ahead and do the same in 4e.

This is a separate, albeit related, issue - the gamist vs. simulationist approach of hit points isn't what we're talking about. We're talking about the mechanics of hit points versus how the fluff works with said mechanics. They're similar, but fundamentally different, which is why the regenerate spell has been virtually useless in every edition of the game.

 

[pemerton]

Alzrrius, first, a thank-you for the considered reply.

Because Character B has more wounds (or a much more severe single wound) than character A does.

<snip>

it heals the same wound on Character B...still leaving him with a myriad number of other wounds, which will require more time or magic to heal.

<snip>

The fluff I wrote for how healing works solves the problem you mentioned.

<snip>

The idea is that all healing magic starts with the worst wounds (those that brought the character to 0 hp and below) and works backwards from there.

I still think that this idea suggests that the spells are misnamed - it should be "cure one wound", "cure several wounds", "cure many wounds" etc. - but otherwise I sort-of see where you're going here. Though I think it odd that it is easier for magic to heal one (near-)fatal wound than to heal two minor cuts or grazes.

It is also odd that 1st level characters never suffer minor cuts or grazes - they are always either uninjured or badly injured by a single wound, and thus always healable to max by a CLW - wherease high level characters are plagued by minor cuts and grazes which require powerful magic or many low-level spells to heal. This oddness makes me prefer a non-full-physical reading of hit points in AD&D - ie to agree with what Fifth Element and others were saying upthread that what the high-level character is recovering from is not just minor physical damage but also the ablation of luck, mystical protection etc.

It really seems like you negated your own point, here. The 3.5e natural healing mechanic solves this problem quite neatly. Higher-level characters heal more damage, which scales almost perfectly with the fact that they have more hit points in the first place. Problem solved.

My point was that it is no defence of AD&D that 3E solves the problem. This in fact seems to be an admission that AD&D does not have a consistent hit-point system on your interpretation.

Maybe it's just me, but that seems needlessly complex. So healing magic can heal not just physical wounds, but also raise a person's morale? Healing spells can make somebody feel more heartened if they've been intimidated?

Well, one person's complexity is another person's suite of options. I'm someone for whom 4e is the first version of D&D I'm interested in playing since 1990 (and the coming of 2nd ed AD&D) precisely because it has adopted a more narratively flexible approach to damage and healing (and in other parts of the game as well).

When I compare 4e to 3E I see a game that has reduced the complexity of character build, while shifting the complexity into play and narration. I like that.

(And if I want to play a game in which all damage is physical, and a hit point taken or healed realy is a hit point and nothing either more or less, I always have RQ, RM or HARP! I'm one of many who was attracted to RM initially because of the way it handled combat and healing.)

I'm not saying a fluff justification isn't possible; I'm just saying that it's not very good.

I can understand "gritting your teeth and getting through it" for a Healing Surge to restore hit points that were previously narrated as a ruptured lung...but that's not temporary in the way that that'd work - the character has just permanently ignored what was described as a serious wound through sheer willpower.

<snip>

This isn't the character forcing themselves forward for a few minutes; it's them no longer being troubled ever again by a serious wound.

Well, there are two different mechanics in play here - the short rest, and the extended rest.

In previous threads on this topic I have suggested that those who don't like the extended rest recovery mechanics should adopt the following option: narrate all short rests, and all within-episode extended rests as teeth-gritting, and then make sure that sufficient time passes between episodes to satisfy their desire for verisimilitudinous healing. (1st ed AD&D requires the same solution, by the way, if we are not to be confronted by the radically non-verisimilitudinous fact that the most serious non-fatal injury can be recovevered in as little as a fortnight or so by a low hit-point character - something I know from experience to be utterly unreaslistic.)

An alternative, that works equally well for 4e and AD&D, is to just be a bit less grim-and-gritty. (That is, embrace the genre assumptions of this sort of high fantasy.) Assume that, after a few encouraging words from the warlord and patches from the first aid kit, that the wound is stitched/set, that determination makes it possible to keep going, and that healing is taking place over time.

Such a wound can even be brought back into the game - the GM can narrate the next hit against the character as "Favouring your injured leg, you mis-step and the goblin catches you with its spear."

the regenerate spell has been virtually useless in every edition of the game.

Now on this we're agreed.