Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5776038" data-attributes="member: 54877">I see hit points as trying to do too much--in any version, but certainly in a modular D&D design. So the minimal core supports modules by mainly being narrowed down to its critical job, and doing that well. Let me go the long way around. In his design diaries for Arcana Evolved, one of the things Monte Cook discussed when doing that game was that he had to break down 3E into all of its core parts and assumptions, and then rebuild them all up again from scratch with his alternates. I got the impression he knew this would happen, having worked on 3E originally, but even he was surprised at the degree to which it was necessary. If you look casually at AE, with its set of classes and race and spells and feats and skills, you might mistake it for a more casual knock-off of 3E. It's only when you play it, I think, that you see what he is talking about in those diaries. (See the d20 World of Warcraft tabletop rules for something that was a casual knock-off with a veneer or WoW fluff--not really faithful to either D&D or WoW in the process. Or on second thought, don't, as you'll be wasting your time.) I happen to play 3E practically straight for awhile right before AE was available, and then immediately switched to playing AE practically straight for awhile. No appreciable 3rd party stuff, no serious house rules, and not even 3E stuff in the AE game (though you could readily mix them), with adventures I wrote entirely myself designed to accept the central assumptions and mechanics of those games at face value. It was a bit of culture shock--almost entirely pleasant and interesting, but still a shock.  Everything that you used to do before, conceptually, you could still do, often better.  Who did it, how they did it, how it interacted with everyone else--that was the shock.  In some ways, it was more of a shock than 3E to 4E, because 4E telegraphed that it was so different. I think the reason this happens is that an RPG design may often have a core structure that is fairly consistent, the surface of it is filled with little compromises, which have then been judiciously rounded off to aid in play. The canonical example is probably armor as AC. Once you understand the design, it makes perfect sense (like it or not). But that's because you can see the compromises that were made. As you well know from frequent discussions that we have participated in over the last year, healing surges have their own pieces and assumptions that have been rounded off, that people frequently must unpack before they can effectively critique the design. So to get back to hit points, I think that Monte and Mike and company can break down hit points into its pacing pieces, narrative aids, tactical parts, simulation of damage, luck, etc. side, and so forth. Then I think they can see what parts they want to vary, pull those out of the base system, and replace them with other constructs that will support variance more than 4E (or 3E or whatever) would straight. But how exactly that will look, I can't say. I know Monte did it at least once before, and that Mike understands what he did and repeated some of it in 4E, and I've seen the process work from the inside in other disciplines (e.g. software design).  One of the characteristics of such an approach is that things that used to be bundled together get split, and things that used to be separate get bundled--like healing surges have surface analogies with elements of 3E healing and pacing, but no direct correspondence when you look deeper. Thus my prediction and expectation that there is a core, critical element recognizable as hit points that will still be there--though perhaps not in the ways that most of use would say today.  I know that is barely less abstract that what went before, but that's the problem with intuition on design. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" /></blockquote>

Verification