4e D&D is a game of dramatic, dynamic heroes...but it can also be a game of gritty, nail-biting survival tension. INCONCEIVABLE, you say? Baby, I believe at least six impossible things before breakfast. I've got three little tricks that turn this ruleset into my obedient little spaniel. Come watch it beg for treats.
Less Explosions, More Slow Burns
One of the more controversial steps 4e took toward its vision of a heroic fantasy game was to embrace the idea of an exciting, compelling, up-and-down pace to the game, one that emphasized coming close to death, and snapping victory from its jaws in every encounter. The game was designed from the ground up to have an ebb and flow of character HP and monster HP such that every combat, at every level, would follow a similar arc of challenging the party until they healed up and eventually emerged victorious.
This was controversial in part because previous editions had embraced a high-tension dungeon survival style that emphasized strategic resource management and a preponderance of caution in a world that was slowly whittling your life-force away until you could return from the wilderness and heal. The up-and-down roller-coaster style wasn’t always a change for the better, and 4e never really embraced this style.
Rules reinforce experience. A lot of people weren't fond of the experience 4e's rules were selling.
By default. Because this is D&D, and because we are all tinkerers, default is only one mode to run on. The possibility of a grittier, more survival-oriented style was always there. One of the amazing accomplishments of 4e is a truly tight, symmetrical, well-integrated math system, and this gives 4e the quality of being remarkably hackable. Though official publications haven’t delivered much on this promise, a canny observer will see a lot of potential within 4e’s structure. A lot of oh so exploitable structure.
What this means is that, regardless of what kind of game it insisted on being in the official material, a lot of different kinds of games can run on 4e’s math-chassis quite well. Even if you think Rob Heinsoo and James Wyatt shot your dog back in 2008, you can use that mathematical underpinning they developed for your own nefarious purposes. It might not be entirely obvious how to do that, but it’s entirely possible, and that’s what I’m here for today: to show you a few strategies to make 4e’s math work for your games like a well-trained seal, performing tricks for your amusement.
In particular, I’m here to tell you how you can rather easily play 4e with an experience closer to that of early-edition dungeon survival than of 4e-style heroic near-death-and-resurgence. It really only involves three major steps that, when combined, create a game where your characters will hoard HP’s closer, spend their resources more wisely, and ultimately adopt a more cautious, tempered style of play than 4e normally encourages.
This....is not going to heal in 5 minutes.
Step 1: Rip Out Healing Surges
A concept that 4e introduced into the core was the idea that your HP pool doesn’t represent all of your HP. In addition to your typical HP pool, you have a second pool of “healing surges” that can be used to replenish your HP. They are meant to be used in combat whenever you are healed, and out of combat whenever you want to top off your current HP. They’re similar to “reserve points” from 3e’s Unearthed Arcana. They help account for long-term attrition in 4e, while keeping every encounter balanced assuming that the PC’s have full HP.
But let’s say you hate them and want them to die in a fire. Let’s say you’re a big fan of “Your HP is your HP, and when it is gone, you are gone,” and imagine healing surges in D&D work about as well as “Sanity Surges” would work in Call of Cthulu. Or, that you just don’t want to deal with the added complexity. Thanks to 4e’s tight math, it’s not a big deal. There’s actually a few ways you can do it. Here’s one.
Each healing surge is considered to be ¼ of your character’s HP. So the easy way to get rid of them is just to take your character’s number of surges, and take ¼ of your character’s HP, and multiply them together. Add the total onto your max HP.
As an example: you’re a first-level Fighter with a CON of 14 (+2). You normally have 29 hp and 11 surges, with a surge value of 7. To get rid of surges, just convert all of your surges to HP (77) and add them to your HP total (29 + 77). Your fighter now has 106 HP. A first-level Wizard with a CON of 8, in comparison, has 38 HP.
Step 2: Healthy, Wounded, Bloodied, and Critical
Having a large pool of HP does change the arc of each combat pretty dramatically. Characters in this system won’t get bloodied very easily, and they’ll stay bloodied for longer when they do. They’ll also be less at-risk in each encounter of falling unconscious, which makes them slightly more survivable overall. If you construct encounters as recommended, you may find your players not really in need of much healing or at risk of dying until 2 or 3 encounters into the day.
Healing might need to change a bit, too, if you’re using this. For one, you can’t heal HP with a short rest (you’ve already “spent” your surges, so to speak). You do heal all of your HP with an extended rest.
For two, abilities that let you heal in combat (like second wind or the various leader abilities) suddenly are a lot less potent – anything that enables you to “spend a surge” essentially doesn’t contain that step anymore, and so you don’t regain that HP. Leaders are now far less important to the party’s survival, and you could even play without a party healer, and be completely fine. Healing that doesn’t rely on surges is still viable, but it becomes virtually the only source of big healing in a game where the cleric only restores 1d6 HP, twice per encounter.
Encounter-based healing raises a bit of a different issue, too: there’s nothing stopping that cleric from “spamming” Healing Word out of combat and just healing everyone up to full 1d6 HP at a time. You can just put in a hard limit on the number of times that a character can benefit from that (say, four times per Milestone), but this might be a little too similar to healing surges, and is at any rate a little arbitrary and clearly meta-game.
There’s a way to fix both the issue with being bloodied and the issue with spamming minor healing abilities, and it involves stealing an idea from 5e: there are HP thresholds that you can’t heal up above once you pass below them. Bloodied (ie: ½ hp) is one, but we’ll add two more: one at about ¾ HP (let’s call it Wounded), and one at about ¼ HP (let’s call it Critical). Once you’ve passed below that threshold, you can’t heal up above it, except with Daily abilities. To calculate this, let’s just divide the character’s new Max HP by 4, round it down, and consider that the amount of damage they need to take before they cross a threshold. Our example Fighter crosses these thresholds every 26 HP (Wounded at 80 HP, Bloodied at 54 HP, Critical at 28 HP). Our example Wizard crosses these thresholds every 9 HP (Wounded at 29 HP, Bloodied at 20 HP, Critical at 11 HP). Rather than be precise about the fractions, we just take any remainders that total to a full HP, and add them onto Critical (when you need them most anyway).
Crossing one of these thresholds is the new equivalent of “when you are bloodied.” After crossing one of these thresholds in an encounter, you can be considered “bloodied” until the end of that encounter. So a Dragonborn Fury kicks in for the rest of an encounter, after you become Wounded, Bloodied, or Critical. An ability that triggers when you become bloodied now triggers when you become Wounded, Bloodied, or Critical.
Step 3: A Little Rest and Relaxation
So, now you have characters who, over time, suffer injuries and gradually lose their HP, without getting it back. It’s a slow slide to 0 rather than the up-and-down experience of most of 4e. You can use that modification simply as-is, without any further alterations to the 4e game, if you want.
But, we still have a situation where a character recovers all of their HP with a night’s sleep. One good rest, and every wound and injury just goes away. There’s a few things we can do to make those injuries last a little longer.
The first is to make getting that rest a little more difficult. We can do this by making a distinction between areas where you can easily take a rest, and areas where it might be a little riskier. Going to sleep in the middle of a dungeon or out in the monster-infested wilderness is going to be a much different experience from bedding down at an inn and eating a hearty dinner. We can reflect that by making certain areas in the world Sanctuaries.
A Sanctuary becomes a place where the party can take an extended rest. If they are within a Sanctuary, they can sleep all night and gain the full benefits from that rest. If they are not in a Sanctuary, a night’s rest won’t recover them above their current threshold (wounded, bloodied, or critical), and you do not get Daily abilities back. A sleep out in the wilderness won’t help you much more than the cleric spamming Healing Word, and won’t bring back the big cures, either.
Sanctuaries become places you can place as a DM, or places that the characters can make – a skill challenge or a feat to be able to make someplace a Sanctuary, if only for one night, can be extremely compelling. With them in the game, we now have a way to limit where the party can heal up to full – only in a place that allows it. This might be a local inn, the character’s home, a druid’s grove, a thief’s safe-house, an ally’s farm, or any other location the DM decrees to be safe enough to rest fully in.
That’s the first prong: make the restoration of all HP dependent on being in the right place.
The second prong is this: extend the time it takes to get a rest.
It’s really trivially easy. You define a “short rest” as one night’s sleep, and an “extended rest” as a longer period, let’s say one week, of rest and relaxation and recuperation. You can take Short Rests anywhere by spending the night. You recover your “encounter” powers (which now come back every day) and up to your current HP threshold. You can take Extended Rests only in Sanctuaries, where you recover all HP and all “daily” powers (which now come back every week), but only if you take a week’s vacation there.
This does change the pacing of the game a bit: your encounter XP budget is really your “daily” XP budget, and the PC’s are expected to get through two (maybe three) days before taking a week off. Every two days, they get a Milestone. If you want to break a given “day” up into more than one encounter, it might pay to use more minions and fewer “standard” monsters.
Full Life Consequences
Ultimately, the effect of these three steps is to make your game more about the slow attrition of HP over time, rather than the constant up-and-down process that 4e players are familiar with. As an add-on effect, it makes the “someone must play a Leader” effect much less pronounced, since you don’t need to heal up in the middle of a combat anymore. A Leader can contribute a lot to this group, but isn’t as essential.
Naturally, with less ability to recover, the creeping demise facing your party will be much more intimidating. Every wound and hit and failed save will bring you inexorably closer to the reaper standing at 0 HP, and though the slide is slow, it is all the more frightening for being part of the cost of being a hero. Recovery is difficult – only possible after resting for a full week in a Sanctuary. A night’s sleep can help (it’ll recover Encounter powers and some HP), but it will only slow the slide. This might be attractive to games with a strong survival vibe.
And yet, the balance and math of the game remain practically unchanged. You can use any monster, any adventure, any challenge, and it will work as expected.
So, what do you think? Want to use this in your 4e games tomorrow? Think a 4e game using this rule might be a little more fun than a typical 4e game? Excited for the versatility of games this might offer you? See any problems I missed? Let me know down in the comments!
Less Explosions, More Slow Burns
One of the more controversial steps 4e took toward its vision of a heroic fantasy game was to embrace the idea of an exciting, compelling, up-and-down pace to the game, one that emphasized coming close to death, and snapping victory from its jaws in every encounter. The game was designed from the ground up to have an ebb and flow of character HP and monster HP such that every combat, at every level, would follow a similar arc of challenging the party until they healed up and eventually emerged victorious.
This was controversial in part because previous editions had embraced a high-tension dungeon survival style that emphasized strategic resource management and a preponderance of caution in a world that was slowly whittling your life-force away until you could return from the wilderness and heal. The up-and-down roller-coaster style wasn’t always a change for the better, and 4e never really embraced this style.
Rules reinforce experience. A lot of people weren't fond of the experience 4e's rules were selling.
By default. Because this is D&D, and because we are all tinkerers, default is only one mode to run on. The possibility of a grittier, more survival-oriented style was always there. One of the amazing accomplishments of 4e is a truly tight, symmetrical, well-integrated math system, and this gives 4e the quality of being remarkably hackable. Though official publications haven’t delivered much on this promise, a canny observer will see a lot of potential within 4e’s structure. A lot of oh so exploitable structure.
What this means is that, regardless of what kind of game it insisted on being in the official material, a lot of different kinds of games can run on 4e’s math-chassis quite well. Even if you think Rob Heinsoo and James Wyatt shot your dog back in 2008, you can use that mathematical underpinning they developed for your own nefarious purposes. It might not be entirely obvious how to do that, but it’s entirely possible, and that’s what I’m here for today: to show you a few strategies to make 4e’s math work for your games like a well-trained seal, performing tricks for your amusement.
In particular, I’m here to tell you how you can rather easily play 4e with an experience closer to that of early-edition dungeon survival than of 4e-style heroic near-death-and-resurgence. It really only involves three major steps that, when combined, create a game where your characters will hoard HP’s closer, spend their resources more wisely, and ultimately adopt a more cautious, tempered style of play than 4e normally encourages.
This....is not going to heal in 5 minutes.
Step 1: Rip Out Healing Surges
A concept that 4e introduced into the core was the idea that your HP pool doesn’t represent all of your HP. In addition to your typical HP pool, you have a second pool of “healing surges” that can be used to replenish your HP. They are meant to be used in combat whenever you are healed, and out of combat whenever you want to top off your current HP. They’re similar to “reserve points” from 3e’s Unearthed Arcana. They help account for long-term attrition in 4e, while keeping every encounter balanced assuming that the PC’s have full HP.
But let’s say you hate them and want them to die in a fire. Let’s say you’re a big fan of “Your HP is your HP, and when it is gone, you are gone,” and imagine healing surges in D&D work about as well as “Sanity Surges” would work in Call of Cthulu. Or, that you just don’t want to deal with the added complexity. Thanks to 4e’s tight math, it’s not a big deal. There’s actually a few ways you can do it. Here’s one.
Each healing surge is considered to be ¼ of your character’s HP. So the easy way to get rid of them is just to take your character’s number of surges, and take ¼ of your character’s HP, and multiply them together. Add the total onto your max HP.
As an example: you’re a first-level Fighter with a CON of 14 (+2). You normally have 29 hp and 11 surges, with a surge value of 7. To get rid of surges, just convert all of your surges to HP (77) and add them to your HP total (29 + 77). Your fighter now has 106 HP. A first-level Wizard with a CON of 8, in comparison, has 38 HP.
Step 2: Healthy, Wounded, Bloodied, and Critical
Having a large pool of HP does change the arc of each combat pretty dramatically. Characters in this system won’t get bloodied very easily, and they’ll stay bloodied for longer when they do. They’ll also be less at-risk in each encounter of falling unconscious, which makes them slightly more survivable overall. If you construct encounters as recommended, you may find your players not really in need of much healing or at risk of dying until 2 or 3 encounters into the day.
Healing might need to change a bit, too, if you’re using this. For one, you can’t heal HP with a short rest (you’ve already “spent” your surges, so to speak). You do heal all of your HP with an extended rest.
For two, abilities that let you heal in combat (like second wind or the various leader abilities) suddenly are a lot less potent – anything that enables you to “spend a surge” essentially doesn’t contain that step anymore, and so you don’t regain that HP. Leaders are now far less important to the party’s survival, and you could even play without a party healer, and be completely fine. Healing that doesn’t rely on surges is still viable, but it becomes virtually the only source of big healing in a game where the cleric only restores 1d6 HP, twice per encounter.
Encounter-based healing raises a bit of a different issue, too: there’s nothing stopping that cleric from “spamming” Healing Word out of combat and just healing everyone up to full 1d6 HP at a time. You can just put in a hard limit on the number of times that a character can benefit from that (say, four times per Milestone), but this might be a little too similar to healing surges, and is at any rate a little arbitrary and clearly meta-game.
There’s a way to fix both the issue with being bloodied and the issue with spamming minor healing abilities, and it involves stealing an idea from 5e: there are HP thresholds that you can’t heal up above once you pass below them. Bloodied (ie: ½ hp) is one, but we’ll add two more: one at about ¾ HP (let’s call it Wounded), and one at about ¼ HP (let’s call it Critical). Once you’ve passed below that threshold, you can’t heal up above it, except with Daily abilities. To calculate this, let’s just divide the character’s new Max HP by 4, round it down, and consider that the amount of damage they need to take before they cross a threshold. Our example Fighter crosses these thresholds every 26 HP (Wounded at 80 HP, Bloodied at 54 HP, Critical at 28 HP). Our example Wizard crosses these thresholds every 9 HP (Wounded at 29 HP, Bloodied at 20 HP, Critical at 11 HP). Rather than be precise about the fractions, we just take any remainders that total to a full HP, and add them onto Critical (when you need them most anyway).
Crossing one of these thresholds is the new equivalent of “when you are bloodied.” After crossing one of these thresholds in an encounter, you can be considered “bloodied” until the end of that encounter. So a Dragonborn Fury kicks in for the rest of an encounter, after you become Wounded, Bloodied, or Critical. An ability that triggers when you become bloodied now triggers when you become Wounded, Bloodied, or Critical.
Step 3: A Little Rest and Relaxation
So, now you have characters who, over time, suffer injuries and gradually lose their HP, without getting it back. It’s a slow slide to 0 rather than the up-and-down experience of most of 4e. You can use that modification simply as-is, without any further alterations to the 4e game, if you want.
But, we still have a situation where a character recovers all of their HP with a night’s sleep. One good rest, and every wound and injury just goes away. There’s a few things we can do to make those injuries last a little longer.
The first is to make getting that rest a little more difficult. We can do this by making a distinction between areas where you can easily take a rest, and areas where it might be a little riskier. Going to sleep in the middle of a dungeon or out in the monster-infested wilderness is going to be a much different experience from bedding down at an inn and eating a hearty dinner. We can reflect that by making certain areas in the world Sanctuaries.
A Sanctuary becomes a place where the party can take an extended rest. If they are within a Sanctuary, they can sleep all night and gain the full benefits from that rest. If they are not in a Sanctuary, a night’s rest won’t recover them above their current threshold (wounded, bloodied, or critical), and you do not get Daily abilities back. A sleep out in the wilderness won’t help you much more than the cleric spamming Healing Word, and won’t bring back the big cures, either.
Sanctuaries become places you can place as a DM, or places that the characters can make – a skill challenge or a feat to be able to make someplace a Sanctuary, if only for one night, can be extremely compelling. With them in the game, we now have a way to limit where the party can heal up to full – only in a place that allows it. This might be a local inn, the character’s home, a druid’s grove, a thief’s safe-house, an ally’s farm, or any other location the DM decrees to be safe enough to rest fully in.
That’s the first prong: make the restoration of all HP dependent on being in the right place.
The second prong is this: extend the time it takes to get a rest.
It’s really trivially easy. You define a “short rest” as one night’s sleep, and an “extended rest” as a longer period, let’s say one week, of rest and relaxation and recuperation. You can take Short Rests anywhere by spending the night. You recover your “encounter” powers (which now come back every day) and up to your current HP threshold. You can take Extended Rests only in Sanctuaries, where you recover all HP and all “daily” powers (which now come back every week), but only if you take a week’s vacation there.
This does change the pacing of the game a bit: your encounter XP budget is really your “daily” XP budget, and the PC’s are expected to get through two (maybe three) days before taking a week off. Every two days, they get a Milestone. If you want to break a given “day” up into more than one encounter, it might pay to use more minions and fewer “standard” monsters.
Full Life Consequences
Ultimately, the effect of these three steps is to make your game more about the slow attrition of HP over time, rather than the constant up-and-down process that 4e players are familiar with. As an add-on effect, it makes the “someone must play a Leader” effect much less pronounced, since you don’t need to heal up in the middle of a combat anymore. A Leader can contribute a lot to this group, but isn’t as essential.
Naturally, with less ability to recover, the creeping demise facing your party will be much more intimidating. Every wound and hit and failed save will bring you inexorably closer to the reaper standing at 0 HP, and though the slide is slow, it is all the more frightening for being part of the cost of being a hero. Recovery is difficult – only possible after resting for a full week in a Sanctuary. A night’s sleep can help (it’ll recover Encounter powers and some HP), but it will only slow the slide. This might be attractive to games with a strong survival vibe.
And yet, the balance and math of the game remain practically unchanged. You can use any monster, any adventure, any challenge, and it will work as expected.
So, what do you think? Want to use this in your 4e games tomorrow? Think a 4e game using this rule might be a little more fun than a typical 4e game? Excited for the versatility of games this might offer you? See any problems I missed? Let me know down in the comments!
But the amount they have is the amount of actual HP that a standard 4e character can call upon, so it doesn't give them anything above and beyond what 4e already assumes they have. 
