Healing Potions seem woeful

[Majoru Oakheart]

But when they did get wounded like that, did they take a nap and have everything be okay? I guess that's my biggest problem. It's not the abstraction of HP. It's the abstraction that no matter how badly wounded you are, as long as your not dead, six hours of rest makes you just like new.

This is for playability reasons. For example:
The evil Necromancer has an army of undead rampaging across the countryside. They will reach a major city in about 6 hours. No one will believe the players that it exists, so they need to go stop it themselves. The Necromancer sends a bunch of undead against the PCs in order to stop them. One of the PCs gets wounded really badly due to a couple of crits in a row. It ends up using all the healing of the party and he is still low on hitpoints.

Now, the PCs know that when they face off against the necromancer himself that it is going to be a harder battle than the one they already fought and their fighter is low on hitpoints and nearly dead. The DM planned his adventure around the fact that the PCs would be able to take both the group of undead and the necromancer in the same day.

Now, "realistically", the fighter in question is hurt badly. It should take him ages to recover. Probably months of bed rest or at least another day worth of magical healing. In any novel or movie, the author would have just written it such that the fighter didn't take any damage in the first combat and heroically ran into battle against the necromancer. Unfortunately, the dice are much more random than that.

So, in this situation, you have 2 real choices: come up with a system that allows people to get hit and hurt and risk death in every encounter to make the dice mean something and bring tension to the combat WHILE simultaneously allowing the PCs to fight multiple battles during a day predictably OR change your adventure around unexpected damage/deaths/petrification/etc.

The second option is valid, but requires almost as much suspension of disbelief OR a lot of work. I mean, how many times do the evil cultists suddenly decide to wait a month to sacrifice the woman simply because the PCs took a lot of damage in the entryway of their lair and had to rest up to full hitpoints before it becomes kind of dumb?

It just seems like previous editions of the game were more flexible out of the box.

They weren't. They REQUIRED you to factor in their mechanics. You couldn't run more than 3 somewhat challenging combats per day at 5th level. There wasn't enough healing spells to keep a party alive for 4 unless the group had 2 clerics. You couldn't run a low magic game out of the box in 3e, the game assumed a certain amount of healing and magic items in order to defeat standard monsters.

1st and 2nd Edition were more flexible, in that they had almost no rules so the default rule became "make stuff up", and when that is the default rule it becomes VERY flexible. Plus, most of the monsters were extremely easy to beat. They were so far below PC power that combat was an effort in die rolling. Some other monsters were dangerous, but only because one wrong die roll and you were dead.

However, the flexibility in 1e/2e was HEAVILY dependent on knowledge and experience with the system. Knowing whether a medusa was an appropriate monster to throw against a 5th level party required factoring in so many things that it was near unpredictable. Did this group happen to have +5 armor at 5th level? Did the figher roll an 18 for strength and get a race from a book that gave +1 strength? Did he double specialize in his weapon? Was the person playing the cleric the type of person who prepared a lot of healing?

In fact, it was SO unpredictable that most DMs worked under a "choose a monster that fits the plot of the adventure and pray it doesn't kill everyone". At least most of the DMs I knew.

Which is exactly why when 3e came out my first thought was "Wow...you mean, I actually get told by the book about how hard these enemies are? So I don't have to guess? AWESOME!" Until a couple months later when I started to realize that there were so many different ways to tweak both the PCs and the monsters that the system didn't predict difficulty accurately. So, you had to fall back on experience and knowledge of the system to be able to predict if any particular CR 10 creature was actually appropriate for a level 10 party.

 

[silentounce]

This is for playability reasons. For example:
The evil Necromancer has an army of undead rampaging across the countryside. They will reach a major city in about 6 hours. No one will believe the players that it exists, so they need to go stop it themselves. The Necromancer sends a bunch of undead against the PCs in order to stop them. One of the PCs gets wounded really badly due to a couple of crits in a row. It ends up using all the healing of the party and he is still low on hitpoints.

Now, the PCs know that when they face off against the necromancer himself that it is going to be a harder battle than the one they already fought and their fighter is low on hitpoints and nearly dead. The DM planned his adventure around the fact that the PCs would be able to take both the group of undead and the necromancer in the same day.

Now, "realistically", the fighter in question is hurt badly. It should take him ages to recover. Probably months of bed rest or at least another day worth of magical healing. In any novel or movie, the author would have just written it such that the fighter didn't take any damage in the first combat and heroically ran into battle against the necromancer. Unfortunately, the dice are much more random than that.

So, in this situation, you have 2 real choices: come up with a system that allows people to get hit and hurt and risk death in every encounter to make the dice mean something and bring tension to the combat WHILE simultaneously allowing the PCs to fight multiple battles during a day predictably OR change your adventure around unexpected damage/deaths/petrification/etc.

The second option is valid, but requires almost as much suspension of disbelief OR a lot of work. I mean, how many times do the evil cultists suddenly decide to wait a month to sacrifice the woman simply because the PCs took a lot of damage in the entryway of their lair and had to rest up to full hitpoints before it becomes kind of dumb?

It doesn't take any suspension of disbelief to have the undead army win, now does it?

Are DMs not allowed to kill PCs anymore? Is that what heroic means? My character will no longer die.

Hell, that gives that fighter the perfect opportunity to go down in a blaze of glory. Maybe they'll be able to beat the necromancer, maybe not. Hell, there are so many ways to deal with that situation that won't kill off that character anyway or hurt disbelief.

And in my world, the evil cultists won't wait. Doesn't anybody else play with consequences for PC failure? Is this what D&D has become?

I am by no means a kill them all DM. DM vs. players TPK kind of guy. But my players know that it is a distinct possibility. It's not a given that they will win. Honestly, when running, I fudge it in their favor more than they ever suspect. But that's the key, they don't even realize it. Giving this instant cure with rest thing takes some of that ability out of the DMs hands. I'd rather my players believe they are in desperate straits and do their great deeds in spite of it.

I don't agree with your novel/movie example either. Plenty of movies have main characters die. Or people going into battle despite being grievously injured. Hell, since HP are an abstraction, right? Maybe the fighter in your example wasn't really "wounded". It didn't appear that way in the book, but he could have been low on abstract HP.

I'm also not afraid of the "lot of work" that you mentioned. A good, experienced DM should be able to adjust things on the fly. And, honestly, it usually doesn't require tons of work. Not changing due to situation amounts to railroading. I guess 4e comes with railroading built in. Also, I know you're just giving an example, but your statement that "no one will believe" about the army is also railroading. Heck, maybe the PCs would rather come up with some kind of elaborate plan to convince the populace. Maybe they'd rather spend time on that. Sure, a combat confrontation will eventually happen. But wouldn't that situation also throw a wrench into the DMs plans? In my opinion it's a poor DM who will simply say something cannot be done no matter what the PCs do, at least let them try. PCs do that kind of stuff all the time, things that you don't expect, haven't planned for, or want them to do. I don't think I've ever run something that's gone exactly the way I planned it. That's part of the fun of being a DM for me.

Someone please tell me I'm not the only one that runs campaigns this way.

EDIT: And as for your last paragraph (it's not in the quote, but in your original post), how do you know that 4e is any better in this regard? I'm not saying it isn't, but there are very few of us that have played it enough to be able to answer that question.

 

[thatdarnedbob]

Someone please tell me I'm not the only one that runs campaigns this way.

EDIT: And as for your last paragraph (it's not in the quote, but in your original post), how do you know that 4e is any better in this regard? I'm not saying it isn't, but there are very few of us that have played it enough to be able to answer that question.

You're not; I'm the other one. Most recently, I put my players through a mash-up of Red Hand of Doom and Rise of the Runelords, and the final session at the battle for Brindol could have gone either way, and the players knew it. And when I start up the next campaign in August, same deal applies; it'll be very possible for everything their characters care about to be destroyed. I implore DMs everywhere: if you are faced with the choice between making something illogical happen to save the players' bacon and being a rat bastard, start squeaking.

 

[silentounce]

You're not; I'm the other one. Most recently, I put my players through a mash-up of Red Hand of Doom and Rise of the Runelords, and the final session at the battle for Brindol could have gone either way, and the players knew it. And when I start up the next campaign in August, same deal applies; it'll be very possible for everything their characters care about to be destroyed. I implore DMs everywhere: if you are faced with the choice between making something illogical happen to save the players' bacon and being a rat bastard, start squeaking.

Yeah, that way when they win, they know they've actually achieved something. They'll thank you for it.

 

[Gort]

I don't know if a lot of the haters in the thread have actually played the game, or are just reading the rules and thinking, "What! There's no threat any more!"

I've already run two sessions of 4e and had one character death. (Irontooth's lair, say no more) There is definitely no shortage of threat in 4e - it's just that the threat comes from the monsters/traps/hazards in the encounters taking you down from full powers/healing surges/everything to dead, rather than the 3e style of "Well, no fight is particularly lethal, but having 4 in a day means you'll be low on resources by the last one, and might die!"

There's no real attrition over the course of a day now, that's true. But what that means is that you're free to have every fight be a serious threat, instead of a fight that's supposed to "wear the characters down".

In general though, I suggest that those who are simply reading the rules and then posting on the Internet actually play the game and see how it feels. The game seriously plays a lot better than it bears analysis.

 

[theNater]

I'm also not afraid of the "lot of work" that you mentioned. A good, experienced DM should be able to adjust things on the fly.

I'm afraid of that "lot of work". I've run maybe a dozen sessions in the 16 years since I started playing, and I'm still very uncomfortable adjusting things on the fly.

During my time as a player, I've been across the table from maybe 3 good, experienced DMs. I'm happy with rules that make things easy for poor, novice DMs because the experienced DMs are the ones who can change the rules they don't like. Novice DMs are usually too nervous to do it, or too inexperienced to do it well.

 

[silentounce]

I've already run two sessions of 4e and had one character death. (Irontooth's lair, say no more)

That doesn't say much. Throwing a bunch of PCs at an encounter five levels above their own will surely result in deaths when playing any edition of D&D rules. Does the fact that two five-headed hydras or a chain devil can kick the crap out of a first level 3.5e party say anything worthwhile about the lethality/danger of that system? We should be talking about facing equal level encounters, what PCs should normally be facing day to day.

You know what I think about that encounter? I think they threw that in there on purpose early on knowing that it would likely be very tough and cause character deaths so that people would end up thinking just what you've said. Oooooo... 4e is still dangerous and lethal. That encounter is severely unbalanced, that's all. This has been commented on by so many who've played through KotS. That doesn't really prove anything about the lethality of the system or the risk to the characters.

 

[Blackeagle]

But when they did get wounded like that, did they take a nap and have everything be okay? I guess that's my biggest problem. It's not the abstraction of HP. It's the abstraction that no matter how badly wounded you are, as long as your not dead, six hours of rest makes you just like new.

Well, in previous editions, instead of the player's resting for six hours and ending up like new the cleric rested for the night and then made the players like new.

It just seems like previous editions of the game were more flexible out of the box. You could run those kinds of games without changing much of anything, at least not changing core mechanics, such as the way characters heal. And, yeah, you can try and house rule out of it. Like people have mentioned above. But the entire system balance, encounter balance, etc, is based around this.

Unless you wanted to play a game without interventionist deities, or a low magic campaign, or just a campaign where no one wanted to play the walking band-aid box. It seems like most of what you dislike are things that the designers put in to get rid of the dependency on the cleric. I think making it possible to get rid of the cleric opens up a lot more possibilities in terms of different kinds of games than the healing surge system forecloses.

D&D has always been heroic fantasy, but previously you could play a lot of different styles with hardly a change. I'll still give it a try, but it seems like this version of D&D is forcing you to play a certain way more so than others.

See, I don't really see those "different styles" in previous editions. The previous editions were not very modular, they forced certain features into your game whether you wanted them or not. None of the previous editions handled low magic or no magic very well, and none of them handled worlds without interventionist deities, because healing was all tied up with divine magic. I think getting rid of the dependence on the cleric is one of the biggest advancements of 4e.

 

[Dayspire]

In our game, we sort of view Healing Surges as the new hit points. When you're out of them, you're hurting. Out of breath, out of morale, cut from a dozen small wounds, your reflexes are slow, and the next good hit, you're going to go down.

 

[FoolishFrost]

Is that an example from actual play, or is it something you just made up on the fly for the discussion?

If it's the latter, you should really try to provide one of the former.

Why? Doesn't make it any less viable.

And some of us got the books on the 6th, and are still figuring it all out, you know? I don't tend to run games without having a full understanding and overview of the rules first. That's one of my jobs as the GM: Understand the rules enough to make moderated decisions about gameplay.

Luckily, the section on healing, healing surges, and damage were pretty much on 2 pages. Very easy to understand, it seems.

Still figuring out the specifics on combat moves. Lot of options there.