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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 6292161" data-attributes="member: 37579">IIRC, falling damage is identical between 3e and 4e. And the glowing stick isn’t even needed in 4e, you just need to sit for 5 minutes, have a sandwich, and you’re ready for your next orbital jump. Games should use game logic, but D&D is a role-playing game, which means the game logic should be tempered by both narrative logic and simulationist logic. Neither realism, gamism, or narrativism can have dominance, and compromises should be made for all three. I have lots of game. If I want to play a board game with my friends, I’ll break out a board game. Just like if I want a purely narrative experience I’ll play Fiasco, or a realistic experience I’d join the historical anachronism society or a LARP. I play D&D for an experience that’s a bit of all three. If you remove the narrativism and simulationism from D&D all you have is a miniature combat game. Now tactical miniature games are fine. There are lots of them that do quite well. But if you’re going to make a tactical miniature games, you should go all in and make a tactical miniature games, opposed to something that tries to be both a mini-combat game and a role-playing game. Focused, dedicated play ensures a better experience for people who want that sort of thing. Hitpoints… those are a necessary evil.I’ve regularly and often paraphrased Winston Churchill: hitpoints are the worst possible health tracking system, except for all the others that have been tried. Hitpoints suck. They’re problematic for immersion. But they work with the narrative and the game and thus can trump reality (two against one).Hitpoints work best when you don’t think about them, when you’re in a comfortable state of denial. Healing surges, overnight healing, martial healing really draw attention to hitpoints. The point out the flaws in the system. Clerics also have better hp, attacks, armour, and weapons. So that makes a huge difference beyond spell selection. But... if you had a cleric who dump statted Con and dressed in robes they would play fairly similar to wizards in play: stay in the back, avoid melee, cast spells. Especially if the cleric took a domain that gave them access to wizard spells. The difference between a 3e wizard and sorcerer was their spellcasting system, which is virtually irrelevant. If you gave a wizard the spellpoint system from Unearthed Arcana they wouldn’t stop being a wizard. Similarly, an evoker and illusionist wizard also play radically different. But different spell selections doesn’t make the base classes different; if the two memorized conjuration spells it’d be hard to tell them apart. Just like it’d be hard to spot the difference between a martial cleric warlord with generic powers. Their wounds close? They go back into the fight at 100%? The coach on the side shouts some words of encouragement and the boxer springs back mid-round? The boxer then go and have three other equally or increasingly difficult fights that same day? That’s what healing surges do. There is room for a second wind mechanic, either generic or class based. Let me repeat: there is totaly room for second wind. That’s doable But it should be limited and/or tied to longer rests. But healing surges take that workable idea and go a little far, rendering the concept implausible. It’s not the idea, it’s the execution. And because it went to the extreme, people are planting their heels on all implementations. Just like how 3e botched Level Adjustment, Prestige Classes, and Challenge Rating and now even proposing those ideas illicits a negative reaction. I used to be really, really anti-martial healing because 4e turned it up to 11. Since then I’ve relaxed my views and believe a nice middle ground would work. The D&D5 Hit Dice seem to occupy a nice compromise between the no-second-wind of 3e and the all-second-wind of 4e. The base rules are a little much for me, with full overnight healing. But at least this time the game is designed around house ruling and tweaking so I can adjust that. </blockquote>

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