Excerpt: The Warlord

[JohnSnow]

People often compare dealing with players to herding cats, yet they never think of the obvious solution. Train your players like you train cats; bring a water gun to the table and squirt a player whenever he's obnoxious.

My copy of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay suggests hurling "dice, food, or whatever else you can think of" at a player who is being obnoxious. I guess D&D probably can't include a similar recommendation, but it's nice to dream.

 

[Storm-Bringer]

ThirdWizard, I think you and I are in agreement as to how 4E will/does play. I agree with you that constantly having to drop PCs and have them pop back up is annoying. However, I also agree with Kamikaze Midget that having PCs go down and then come surging back to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat is cool. As such, simply tripling (or quadrupling, or whatever) the pool of hit points, as some have suggested, doesn't provide that sense of characters that are frequently on the "edge of defeat," or "in danger of dying."

Except they aren't really, until they are out of healing surges. As long as they have available healing surges (or second wind, or the warlord, or the cleric, etc), then they really aren't in danger. You have a safety net.

Caveat: I have not playtested 4e. However, I'm reasonably certain that it will provide that exciting surge back to victory often enough without it becoming so routine as to become tedious. Similarly, I believe that the mechanics for negative hit points and healing surge recovery, which I realize some people dislike as "unrealistic," allows one to make each encounter satisfyingly "risky" without leading to the "single encounter adventuring day."

Again, this is solved with increasing the hit points. Unless your hit points are less than the critical hit damage of an opponent (or whatever their most damaging attack is), your character isn't really in danger of losing anything. Now, certainly, you can take a gamble and not use a healing surge.

I like the money analogy, it fits the best. If your checking account (hit points) is low, you can whip out the credit card (healing surge) and cover your purchase. Alternately, someone else can use your credit card for you (cleric) or put some money in your account (certain warlord powers). But unless you are within a certain amount of overdrafting, there isn't really a 'danger' of going over with any given purchase (attack).

The alternative of simply making the "pool of hit points" larger instead leads to attrition-based adventuring, where the only encounter with a real hint of dramatic tension is the one where you're actually low on hit points. Since many players tend to stop before they get there, DMs instead make every encounter more dangerous, thus creating the "15-minute adventuring day" problem.

Spreading out the hit points doesn't really change that. You still aren't in any real danger unless you are out of healing surges or other healing for the day (barring neglect or carelessness). So, you have more of a day before stopping for rest, but you get everything back with six hours of rest anyway, so marginally watching your resources makes each battle what Third Wizard named a tedious cycle.

That's a very real problem that I believe 4e has solved. In the process of finding that solution, they also came up with a rationale for hit points that made a non-magical healing class viable in the game. Hence, we have the Warlord. Personally, I believe this is a substantial improvment on many levels.

(See how I tied that in and made this post actually on-topic? )

But, we haven't corrected anything. The 'solution' is more spread out, by allowing everyone some degree of re-gaining hit points, but that is a solution to 'requiring a cleric', which appears to be a play problem, not a rules problem. Underlying that is the precipitous loss of hit points. Dropping a character in one hit is a danger any time hit points get low. In previous editions, that was most of first and second level.

Which is what makes things 'swingy' no matter where you start. As soon as your hit points are below the threshold of critical hit damage, you are in danger of being 'one-shotted' again. If you start with 30hps, and take 5hp of damage in four attacks, you are in danger of getting taken out in one shot again.

 

[Lacyon]

Except they aren't really, until they are out of healing surges. As long as they have available healing surges (or second wind, or the warlord, or the cleric, etc), then they really aren't in danger. You have a safety net.

You have a small in-battle safety net in the form of Second Wind. Some characters can make that a bigger in-battle safety net in the form of Healing Words or Laying on Hands or whatever. But those run out well before healing surges do!

Which is what makes things 'swingy' no matter where you start. As soon as your hit points are below the threshold of critical hit damage, you are in danger of being 'one-shotted' again. If you start with 30hps, and take 5hp of damage in four attacks, you are in danger of getting taken out in one shot again.

Yes. You are in danger of being one-shotted as long as that shot is preceded by 4 other shots.

Which is definitionally not being one-shotted.

 

[Storm-Bringer]

The only thing that bugs me about the bard..errrrr' Warlord is that described, he's a leader. Most of us will take that to be just that..but the IDIOTS in our hobby will take that as an excuse to boss other players (not PC's..actual players) around and tell them how to run their characters.

jh

I think they addressed that in an earlier article about the warlord. I am sure the previously mentioned squirt gun training tool was advised.

 

[Sir Sebastian Hardin]

Sorry for this offtopic but...
Can anyone copy/paste the text ofthearticle here please? I'm in a PC of my college and I can't enter wizards' web in this PC.

I guess not...

 

[Storm-Bringer]

You have a small in-battle safety net in the form of Second Wind. Some characters can make that a bigger in-battle safety net in the form of Healing Words or Laying on Hands or whatever. But those run out well before healing surges do!

Which is why you don't use them until the healing surges are nearly or completely gone. The same way no one blows all their dailies on the first pack of kobolds of the morning.

Yes. You are in danger of being one-shotted as long as that shot is preceded by 4 other shots.

Which is definitionally not being one-shotted.

Which is why I put it in quotes. It's the same situation as one hit-one kill, just later in the day. That is the point when you have to be careful and marshal your resources. Before that, you are just siphoning off your 'reserve hit points' until those are gone.

And again, this appears to be more of a play issue than a rules issue. If encounters are not survivable, it is probably time to open a dialogue with the DM and discuss throttling back on fighting packs of orcs at first level.

 

[abyssaldeath]

You only get 1 healing-surge per encounter as far as I know. Also, the "healers" only have a limited amount of healing per encounter as well. I have yet to see anything that suggests that there is a ton of healing per encounter as you seem to be eluding.

 

[JohnSnow]

Which is why you don't use them until the healing surges are nearly or completely gone. The same way no one blows all their dailies on the first pack of kobolds of the morning.

Umm...I think you misunderstand how it works. Second Wind represents your ability to use a healing surge mid-combat. It doesn't matter if it's the first combat of the day, the second, or the eighth. Similarly, healing word uses up one of your surges (although the cleric also adds some extra oomph to its effectiveness).

As an example, a fighter could be reduced to bloodied, use his second wind, and then later in the same combat, fall to 0 hp. He runs a risk of dying if this situation takes place. This can happen in the first combat of the day. Assuming he doesn't die, when the combat is over, he can use his other healing surges to return to full health. Three or four would probably do it.

You're taking the assumption that each encounter is a 3e style encounter that nickel and dimes the players down, requiring them to use surges to recover to full hit points, but doesn't actually put them in threat of death.

Which is why I put it in quotes. It's the same situation as one hit-one kill, just later in the day. That is the point when you have to be careful and marshal your resources. Before that, you are just siphoning off your 'reserve hit points' until those are gone.

And again, this appears to be more of a play issue than a rules issue. If encounters are not survivable, it is probably time to open a dialogue with the DM and discuss throttling back on fighting packs of orcs at first level.

Again, you're assuming that in all the earlier battles, the character never gets near 0 hit points. If you want to play that way, that's fine, and you are correct that the problem has only been postponed. But that's not the only way to play with the 4e rules.

In a 3e-style attrition adventure, where only every fourth fight is actually dangerous, you are correct that all you've done is created a situation where the PC has 3-4 times as many hit points. However, that's not how Fourth Edition adventures are intended to work.

With Fourth Edition, the PCs can face 3-4 battles that are as exciting as that climactic encounter in 3e before they have to rest. Or, for a little variety, you can have two of those set-piece battles interspersed with 4 other attrition-style encounters to mix things up. The difference here is that if you simply triple the number of hit points, the only encounter that has an actual risk of death or loss is the last one. Which means you've made the others as meaningless as they were when you had 1/3 of the hit points.

Do you see the difference?

 

[Spatula]

That's just bothersome due to ham-fisted re-calculations. Slows down combat in a terrible way, as the one getting negative levels needs to recalculate everything again and so wastes time for everybody, and additionally grinds the game to a halt, where all excitement is killed.

How does a -1 per neg. lvl on all actions grind the game to a halt?

 

[Spatula]

Except they aren't really, until they are out of healing surges. As long as they have available healing surges (or second wind, or the warlord, or the cleric, etc), then they really aren't in danger. You have a safety net.

You can only use one surge per fight, under your own power (your second wind). Healers can trigger the use of more surges, but those abilities are likewise going to be limited on a per-fight basis. (aside from the paladin's lay on hands, which seems to be per day instead, oddly enough)