Hit points & long rests: please consider?

[nnms]

For someone so uninterested in 5e, you sure seem to like denigrating it a lot.

Umm. Maybe I am not interested in it because it contains elements I dislike? Maybe my playtest contributions will help WotC get me back as a customer with a final product I like (through modularity in this case, see the last paragraph of this post).

Those 'magical miracles' are far more miraculous than you seem to realise. They get you up and going at the click of some fingers. But yet again, people like you seem to misunderstand the entire concept of hit points.

I knew when I added that extra paragraph onto the post that people would glom onto the words I used and my example and totally ignore the principle that can serve to strengthen the fiction.

Realism is important in fantasy because it serves as a point of contrast for the fantastic.

Absolute rule that all fiction must do this? No. Useful technique that some people like in their RPG fiction? Sure.

Here's a very basic sentence to convey what seems to be a very difficult to understand concept: the ONLY time when your character is close to death is when they're at or below 0 hit points and they're rolling Death Saving throws with a very small risk of losing more hit points and dying at minus Con + Level. EVERY other instance of damage is INSIGNIFICANT.

Totally get that. But even insignificant cuts and bruises don't heal in six hours.

I can understand not LIKING that concept but what I can't grasp is how people can't GRASP that concept. People arguing against 'rapid healing' seem caught up in this notion that ALL damage is SIGNIFICANT damage when it simply isn't.

They do grasp it. Telling yourself they don't is probably your mechanism to deflect their criticisms.

It is useful to accent the fantastic by being consistent with the mundane as a point of contrast.

Even insignificant wounds don't heal in 6-8 hours. Having it be so is inconsistent with our experience of the mundane. This lessens the contrast with the fantastic and therefore damages the fiction's integrity. This ties back into the whole suspension of disbelief thing.

You may not have the integrity of the fiction as a priority in your play, but other people do. Instead of trying to convince yourself that they're somehow not grasping something, why not accept where their criticism is coming from? It's okay to prioritize gameplay over fictional concerns. But it's not a universally help approach to RPGs.

This is exactly the type of thing that should have been modular from the word go. Even at the initial playtest level. The people who stopped being WotC's customers because of this design approach in 4E aren't going to stop caring about it just because it's 5E now.

 

[Walking Dad]

Originally Posted by Walking Dad
Great how people discuss getting back to fully operational after some cuts and bruises (that is HP between half max and 1) is totally unrealistic, even than using fantasy herb medicine and a healer's kit, but regaining all magical might to throw balls of flames or resurrect the dead should be regained on daily base...

There's an important principle to fantasy fiction that many people miss. The post above is a classic example of missing it.

You use the mundane to make the extraordinary stand out in contrast.

In 5E, the mundane is more extraordinary than the magical. The best a magical miracle from the gods can do is heal 13 HP. Take a nap for 6 hours? Unlimited HP are instantly restored.

Which fantasy fiction? And you missed something. Healing 13 HP is what a low level priest does. High level priests resurrect the dead.

But I know that some of the best selling D&D fiction is about a drow ranger. And in those books, the heroes are seldom hurt beyond a one days rest. They got bruises and everything and keep going. Do I read the wrong D&D fiction? About which are you talking about?

 

[Steely_Dan]

I do not like characters gaining all HP loss from one night's kip, maybe if Hit Dice played into it, so if you were a 10th level Cleric, you would heal 10d8 HP after a full night's rest.

 

[IronWolf]

I do not like characters gaining all HP loss from one night's kip, maybe if Hit Dice played into it, so if you were a 10th level Cleric, you would heal 10d8 HP after a full night's rest.

Yes, something more akin to this seems like the compromise I would be looking for. A night's rest is still a great chance to get a good chunk of HP back, but isn't a sure thing.

 

[Neonchameleon]

There's definitely work arounds for this too. For instance, how much of an advantage will the undead have when your party leaves? If they were doing most of the protecting for the village, it will likely be overrun in the 6-8 hours it takes to sleep.

And just what makes you think that the PCs are all going to sleep at the same time? Rather than in watches?

I think the problem here is the problem with all bad D&D sessions: they're usually caused by a bad DM.

I think the problem here is that it fails one of the fundamental rules of good design.

A bad DM will either swarm the party so that they don't have enough time to heal, or become complacent and allow them to heal fully after every encounter.

To do this you'd better have 4e level balance mechanics. Because a new DM is going to have problems threading the needle. Or he's going to have to keep coming up with excuses to launch yet another attack after four hours. Rules which make the extended rests take an extended amount of time don't force a new DM to navigate between Scylla and Chrybdis here and therefore don't encourage the DM to DM badly.

I'm curious as to how the mechanics moved a lot of adventuring out of the dungeon. It seems to me that's an area reserved exclusively for the DM.

It wasn't the mechanics. It was the design of adventures. Dungeon-stomps are a limited type of roleplaying. Yes, you can have an excellent game that involves dungeons. But you can have an excellent campaign without an actual dungeon to be seen. If it's either-or then I'd rather have no dungeons to just dungeons (I actually prefer a mix).

 

[Steely_Dan]

Yes, something more akin to this seems like the compromise I would be looking for. A night's rest is still a great chance to get a good chunk of HP back, but isn't a sure thing.

Exactly, 10 to 80 HP recovery a night (healing is variable, as we all know).

A sort of compromise between 3rd and 4th Ed.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

Great how people discuss getting back to fully operational after some cuts and bruises (that is HP between half max and 1) is totally unrealistic, even than using fantasy herb medicine and a healer's kit, but regaining all magical might to throw balls of flames or resurrect the dead should be regained on daily base...

This type of argument gets used frequently, and it's never a good one. Fantasy games should be realistic except in the specific places where they are meant to be fantastic.

Realism lets us use our real world common sense to figure out what to do. Take that away and the game world loses a lot of depth because all we have to base decisions on are the rules, and no matter how good they are they don't match the depth of real life.

 

[nnms]

But I know that some of the best selling D&D fiction is about a drow ranger. And in those books, the heroes are seldom hurt beyond a one days rest. They got bruises and everything and keep going. Do I read the wrong D&D fiction? About which are you talking about?

I'm talking about the general principle of not violating people's suspension of disbelief. R. A. Salvatore does a pretty good job of describing his combats and injuries in a way that does not do this.

But his works are a product of a certain time and a certain rules design ethos of the Lorraine Williams era of TSR. Some of us prefer the fiction that originally inspired D&D and is better represented by the rules design ethos of Arnensen, Gygax, Mentzer, etc.,.

When it comes to the fiction produced by playing Dungeons & Dragons, some people find things like "sleep for six hours and you're at full capacity" to be rather jarring and breaking of one's suspension of disbelief. It also makes fiction where a character is felled by a blow because their injury prevented them from blocking it impossible if the injury happened one sleep ago. Or fiction where an injured party is pursued over multiple days. If they can manage to whole up for an 8 hour period, they turn from running and go back into super hero mode at full capacity.

 

[nnms]

WotC talked about 5E being about getting back players who stopped being their customers because they liked games WotC doesn't sell anymore. It's about uniting the editions. You've heard the hype.

4E's healing mechanics were incredibly divisive back in 2008. Having the same ones present again doesn't match with WotC's own stated design goal of building bridges to customer's they have alienated in the past.

This would have been the perfect chance to demonstrate the much vaunted modularity. But they blew it and just rehashed a 4E mechanic.

Hopefully the next playtest package update will contain a method of healing that is more palatable to the players they alienated with 4E's hit points/healing surge/extended rest mechanics.

Modularity is exactly for this type of situation.

 

[nnms]

This type of argument gets used frequently, and it's never a good one. Fantasy games should be realistic except in the specific places where they are meant to be fantastic.

Realism lets us use our real world common sense to figure out what to do. Take that away and the game world loses a lot of depth because all we have to base decisions on are the rules, and no matter how good they are they don't match the depth of real life.

Well said. I was only talking about the use of realism as a point of contrast with the fantastic, but you've brought up another very interesting point.

If you can't rely on your sense of what is real or plausible when engaging with RPG fiction, you can't bring the depth of the real world to your decision making. This renders the experience far more shallow and fake feeling for those who are sensitive to such things.