Hit point / damage gap in AD&D vs 3e

[Dirigible]

I was reading the recent Save my Game article, and a thought occured to me. Back in 2nd Ed, the rate of hit point acquisition tended to drop drastically at 9th level or so - you stopped rolling your class's hit die, and got a flat one, two or three HP/level (depending on class), plus Con bonus (which was both capped at +2 for non-fighters, and kicked in at a higher ability score level).

That means that low level spells were much more deadly against high level characters in previous editions. Fireball might have been a viable weapon against an enemy 15th-level fighter with, say, 9d10+33 HP. Nowadays, that 10d6 of arcane napalm doesn't looks so great against that same character that has 15d10+45 HP or so.

Seems to me the ramping up of HP in high-level characters means that you tend to require more high-level spells to deal with them quickly. Fireballs and such become the equivalent of pulling out your pistol once you've used up all your rockets and plasma bolts in an FPS. In a sense, I miss the fragility of 2nd Ed characters in situations like this: When iconic spells like Fireball and Lightning bolt become secondary threats, even nuisances, and squads of lower-level enemies lose their threat becasue you're so damn resilient you can easily take them, it changes the flavour a bit.

So, what do you think?

 

[JiffyPopTart]

The change is due to Ye Olde Game Balance.

A 20th level character shouldn't die to 3rd level spells in a one-on-one combat. A 1st level character should never LIVE against 3rd level spells in a one-on-one combat.

I always hated how in 1e and 2e you stopped gaining HP after a certain time. It made the later levels seem rather pointless....especially for fighters.

DS

 

[Gentlegamer]

AD&D wasn't predicated on superhero level characters . . .

In original AD&D, there was no die cap on fireballs, either . . .

 

[Dirigible]

Every level was pointelss for fighters in AD&D

I always hated how in 1e and 2e you stopped gaining HP after a certain time. It made the later levels seem rather pointless....especially for fighters.

I agree with this, and it was one of our most common houserules (roll all the way to level 20! No level caps for demihumans!). However, in retrospect, I can see its value in stopping characters from becoming the walking demigods of uinvulnerability that 3e PCs can become - which is not necessarily bad, I hasten to point out.

Could that have been a tagline? AD&D: The original grim'n'gritty system!

 

[Victim]

Well, characters were still resilent enough to destroy squads of lower level characters in combat.

Really, the early editions weren't really designed to scale the same way 3.x does. HP stopped going up, AC ceased improving at -10 (or was it -12?), damage didn't increase as much. Even the XP system changed after around 9th. Parties around 9th-1tth level could take pretty much anything in the book. The game wasn't really designed to support play at those levels, thus most of the mechanics deemphasized them.

In terms of relative capability, 3.x characters generally need to be higher level than their 1st ed counterparts to accomplish the same feats. Dragons became orders of magnitude more dangerous on the high end. Look at Against the Giants. Giants got up-gunned going from 1st to 2nd, and then an even bigger upgrade in 3rd. That many giants could crush even a large 7th level 3rd ed party using hit and run tactics.

 

[Odhanan]

The Save My Game article is really interesting for several reasons. In my opinion, it clearly shows one of the areas where Third Edition falls short on game design: the number of PCs around the table.

The game's designed for four player characters. Period. Once you are out of this scheme of things, you have to know, as a DM, that you cannot in all situations run the game as written, since the whole point of CRs and equations of challenge surrounding loses a bit more of its meaning with each additional player added/substracted from the base situation the game uses.

That forces the DM to know what s/he's doing, experiment with various types of encounters to find out what will work and what won't with a particular set of characters. Of course, you have to do that kind of thing with any type of RPG really, to explore the rules and get a grasp of the principles underlaying the design to then take it to the next step and tailor the system to your particular needs. But the window of game design Third Edition uses seems to be extremely narrow.

I don't know where that comes from. Was there a overwhelming amount of customer data clearly showing that a huge number of gaming groups out there had four players at the table versus any other possible number of players? Or was it the goal to create a system with this base situation knowing full well that DMs would just sort of houserule the whole thing according to particular groups? Still then, a bit more advice on tailoring encounters according to the number of players at the table, with clear equations and principles, would have been really useful.

The article seems to answer a question I was thinking about for some time: was there some kind of equation that was not specifically spelled out in the DMG? Looks like there isn't, for all intents and purposes. Which I find extremely surprising to say the least, given the detailed nature of the Third Edition rules.

Heh. Nothing's perfect. I love the Third Edition rules!

 

[Glyfair]

I don't know where that comes from. Was there a overwhelming amount of customer data clearly showing that a huge number of gaming groups out there had four players at the table versus any other possible number of players?

Exactly 4 players? No.

From 3-5 players? That's my understanding. Since 4 fills the 4 clasic roles, I'm sure that's why they chose that as the baseline.

 

[Hussar]

Every level was pointelss for fighters in AD&D



I agree with this, and it was one of our most common houserules (roll all the way to level 20! No level caps for demihumans!). However, in retrospect, I can see its value in stopping characters from becoming the walking demigods of uinvulnerability that 3e PCs can become - which is not necessarily bad, I hasten to point out.

Could that have been a tagline? AD&D: The original grim'n'gritty system!

The problem wasn't so much with the magic though. The problem was the monsters simply couldn't do enough damage to be a threat to high level characters in 2e. Other than dragons, the most damage 2e critters could do was around thirty or forty points. Even that 10 die fireball averages to 35, 17 with a save. Yes, you didn't have 300 hit points, but, once you broke 100, there was nothing in the game that could reasonably threaten you on its own.

So, you wound up wading through armies of hill giants on your own.

Not so grim and gritty as all that.

OTOH, 3e characters, yes, have 300 hit points. But, the baddies at that point have a thousand hit point and do 100 points of damage per round. CR 11 giants can do that. And your not going to be breaking 300 at 11th level too often. By and large, most 3e creatures can drop an equivalent level character in a single round with lucky rolling. This simply wasn't true previously.

Maybe my perception is skewed since yesterday the minotaur with a greataxe clocked the PC barbarian with a crit and pumped out 55 points of damage in a single hit. Over a long enough span of time, the DM will ALWAYS get lucky and be able to do massive damage. The players have to get lucky in every fight to survive. The Dm only has to get lucky once.

 

[Odhanan]

Exactly 4 players? No.

From 3-5 players? That's my understanding. Since 4 fills the 4 clasic roles, I'm sure that's why they chose that as the baseline.

Point taken.

Some guidelines indicating ways to adapt encounters to any amount of players would have been very much welcome. I had 6 PCs in my last campaign, and I pretty much had to learn how to adapt CRs on my own. I felt like I was coming up with rough solutions (and was able to do so without too much difficulty) without being able to determine if I was missing some tools in the DMG or I was actually supposed to wing it. Once again, very surprising coming from such a detailed ruleset as 3.X. Seems now that I was doing the right thing, but it would have been nice to know it from the DMG itself.

 

[FireLance]

The Save My Game article is really interesting for several reasons. In my opinion, it clearly shows one of the areas where Third Edition falls short on game design: the number of PCs around the table.

The game's designed for four player characters. Period. Once you are out of this scheme of things, you have to know, as a DM, that you cannot in all situations run the game as written, since the whole point of CRs and equations of challenge surrounding loses a bit more of its meaning with each additional player added/substracted from the base situation the game uses.

That forces the DM to know what s/he's doing, experiment with various types of encounters to find out what will work and what won't with a particular set of characters. Of course, you have to do that kind of thing with any type of RPG really, to explore the rules and get a grasp of the principles underlaying the design to then take it to the next step and tailor the system to your particular needs. But the window of game design Third Edition uses seems to be extremely narrow.

Narrow, yes. But there is a window. 3e says "If you use the standard assumptions, you are likely to get this result. Tinker with the assumptions and you're on your own."

The previous editions said, "There are no standard assumptions. You're on your own."

Now, if you are arguing that the 3e ruleset is more complex and requires more effort to achieve enough mastery to tinker with the assumptions, then you might have a point. But that doesn't seem to be what you're saying. I fail to see how the lack of standard assumptions made it any easier to run a game in previous editions except in relative terms. In 3e, once you let go of the standard assumptions, you need to do the extra work of eyeballing character abilities vs monster abilities to ensure the fight isn't too easy or too deadly. In 2e, you need to do this extra work pretty much all the time, so it seems comparatively less difficult to run non-standard games.