Hit points per encounter, perhaps?

[Plane Sailing]

Complete Speculation:

I wonder whether there will be a mechanism for hit points to refresh 'per encounter'?

Reasoning:

part the first:
One of the things that a designer said was a problem with 3.x encounter design is that you have four equivalent CR challenges which ablate 20% of your resources, then the final encounter becomes the really serious one. If hit points don't refresh, won't that still be a problem of increasing danger of a series of 'equivalent' challenges?

part the second:
A problem with 3e is that you need a cleric or a magic hit point stick (wand of CLW) to heal people up after encounters, otherwise you get back into the 'time to sleep again guys' syndrome.

If 4e has a mechanism for hit point refreshing (whether it is the 'second wind' idea from Saga, or recovering hit points with a 10 minute rest or something else), then

a) each encounter is equally dangerous on its own merits
b) reduced need for magical healing all the time

It will be interesting to see whether this is something that actually appears in the game or not.

 

[JRR_Talking]

the 'diviner' im sure will get a walock type thing that once per round at will can heal d8 hp or something

OR

everyone gets at least fast healing 1 so by the time you have searched for secret doots, robbed bodies etc
you will all be on full HP.

 

[Branduil]

Since the abstract justification for hit points is that they represent your ability to avoid a debilitating blow, it's never really made sense that they don't recover faster. You're not actually injured when you lose hit points, yet for some reason the rules for recovery act as though you are.

 

[fuindordm]

Yeah, but multiple encounters should still be pretty tiring. I think reserve points work great, personally.

Ben

 

[shilsen]

I'm curious to see whether that happens or not too. As someone who had already house-ruled that into my game long ago, it would be a welcome addition to the rules for me, but I can imagine a whole lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth from others over such a change.

 

[Yair]

I hope so.

I doubt it very very much.

The problem with this idea is that chracters won't be hurt. They'd be exhausted (low on hp) or fine (high hp) or dying (negative hp). Taking away the relatively-slowly healing of hp (without magic) puts the final nail in considering them as in any way related to wounds.

Edit: I like the idea of having wound conditions. SWSE seems to do this - if you lose enough hp in one blow, you are wounded. Unlike hp, wounds would require a long time to heal (or magic). I like this idea, but it seems to leave us back where we started - resource depletion.

I think reserve points are fairly likely. They're in Iron Heroes, and 4e seems heavily influenced by it. I actually prefer unlimited hp rejuvination, though. Don't artificially limit the number of encounters per day.

 

[Danzauker]

From what I read on the Star Wars Saga previews, that seems a good system, and I think it's the most likely to be included in 4e.

 

[Atlatl Jones]

I'm curious too. If you go back into the Wizards archive a bit, you can find the design questionnaire that Mearls filled out when he applied to work for them. There's a question to the effect of "what mechanic from a non-RPG game do you find interesting, and why?" Mearls wrote about how the shields work in Halo: they take a while to recover, so in a combat situation there's still danger of being seriously injured. But since they recover once you're out of combat, you start relatively fresh each encounter,without having to pepper the landscape with healing packs, like other FPSs did. It also has wounds, so you can be more permanently injured if you run out of shields in an encounter. It's a lot like Vitality & Wounds, only crits don't automatically go to wounds, and vitality recovers even faster.

I don't know if they'll go that route, because it's more complicated than HPs, but I like his reasoning.

 

[Shadeydm]

In a way HP/encounter are already present in the current edition just look at the Dragon Shaman. If a healing aura of this nature were to become standard issue for clerics (or whatever they end up calling healers now) then you pretty much have hp/encounter build into the game.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

In a way HP/encounter are already present in the current edition just look at the Dragon Shaman. If a healing aura of this nature were to become standard issue for clerics (or whatever they end up calling healers now) then you pretty much have hp/encounter build into the game.

I'd rather that you didn't need a cleric (or dragon shaman, for that matter) to power that effect.

I hope that they move to something like a vitality/wounds system in which vitality refreshes at the end of an encounter, and wounds come in levels, not numbers, applying increasing penalties over time. It'll still be a system based on attrition, but if you take care to protect yourself, you can stay in the dungeon for a long time before you get too beat up to safely continue. It'll also mean that character death will be mostly based on poor decisions rather than on random effects.