I begin to worry...

[Stalker0]

Either the Warlord has magical healing or it doesn't.

Honestly, we have no idea how the warlord's healing works. Maybe it speeds up hitpoint recovery, maybe it converts some hp damage to subdual, perhaps it gives you another "second wind". Those don't have to be magical.

Dnd already takes into account nonmagical healing. You gain hp through rest, and the heal skill increases that. Nothing magical there, makes perfect sense. Now what if we doubled what the heal skill can do, or even trippled. But lets say it could only bring you up to half hitpoints or something like that. Still useful, but its still not "magical healing".

Arguing about the warlord's flavor is pointless at this point, because we honestly do not know how the mechanic works

 

[Grog]

He's reading the subtitles.

Lots of movies are subtitled, too. Do you ever hear people talk about "reading" movies?

 

[Dave Turner]

Again I play several systems and enjoy them all. I think there is a flaw in the mechanics of 4E if it ends up breaking the logic of the hitpoint system in an effort to get rid of healing being an action and spread to all classes. As for 4E I might be advocating a vitality/wound system as the logical extension of where they seem to be going. I figure if they are going to start redefining the hit point mechanic then they might as well go all the way. Either that or go back and look at the problem of the unfun cleric and find another solution that doesn't break the suspension of disbelief.

Thanks for clarifying your position, Brown. I think I understand where you're coming from now. I'll try to paraphrase your position.

There are likely to be at least two flavors of healing in 4E: warlord and clerical. The flavor of clerical healing has traditionally been a magic spell which literally knits wounds shut. That overtly magical healing isn't described as a surge of heroic inspiration that raises flagging spirits. The latter description is what we're expecting the warlord flavor to be like.

Those are two very different styles of healing. One is clearly magical (wounds instantly closing) and obvious. The other is much more subtle and clearly non-magical. Your concern is that these two different flavors of healing will be mechanically identical. If a character is at 1 hp, we could assume, under my previous posts, that the character is described as bruised and bleeding. In this case, 3E has conditioned us to like the clerical flavor of healing: wounds knit closed. In 4E, though, we might get a warlord using "inspiration" to heal the same 1 hp character. In terms of flavor, that would be a character whose wounds remain but musters hidden reserves of willpower and fights on. Are you concerned that these two conflicting forms of healing address the same mechanical conditions but have different types of flavor?

Have I got you wrong? What precisely are the logical flaws you're seeing? I've found that logic is often used too casually to describe something that's muddled, but not necessarily illogical. Many concepts resist logical scrutiny and the mechanics of hit point pools may be one of them.

 

[Sir Brennen]

On the other hand, 100 different types of damage spells and no other types of spells would suck mightily, so hopefully battlefield control will be more extensive than just "pushing your enemies around." Things that can blind, deafen, mind control, cut off, disorient, and stun your opponents still need to be there for me, or that will be a really bad flaw on a new edition.

When giving example of "Hey, this must be a controller guy!", one of the designer's blog post also mentioned walls and fog as other methods they have of controlling the battlefield. I'm not too worried about them ending up as one trick ponies.

 

[Lord Fyre]

First off, I would like to state that I am NOT a 4e hater. I like the trend toward at-will abilities, the warlock, fey, etc. However, I am growing worried about 4e. One would probably wish to ask why.

I am worried about the magic system.

I wouldn't be too worried until spells are changed to collectable cards.

2)Anime Names Two Words: Emerald Frost. I have a friend who reads a heck of a lot of anime. He has assured me that this is quite the anime name.

Of course, that name would also be common in many other fantasy variants - Computer Games, Comics, etc. It is not just anime.

 

[helium3]

The better way to put it is that if you were forced to go into a dungeon solo and get to the end of the dungeon and get the artifact at the end and get out, how well would you do?

Right now, the wizard probably has a good 5 or 10 tricks up his sleeve to not only kill nearly every monster in the dungeon, but avoid all the traps, get over any terrain or obstacle, but be able to avoid them all if necessary. He can scry and teleport to the end. He can turn invisible and walk past all the enemies. He can fly over pits and fireball entire rooms worth of enemies.

The fighter on the other hand will likely die by himself in this situation.

What weird version of D&D are you playing? Both characters would die. There's simply no way a wizard could safely deal with every single challenge in a well designed dungeon by himself unless the designer was purposely making it easy.

I honestly don't believe that wizards are as powerful in 3.5 as everyone seems to think they are. And I've played high level for quite some time.

 

[frankthedm]

Expecially since it's actually hard to READ anime. Usually you read manga.

Ever hear of subtitles?

4) The wizard is now a shadow Looks like the wizard will be stripped of much of his power, so that the fool with the metal stick can compete with the guy who can reshape reality with his mind.

Well, that was already wotc's goal back when they made 3E. They equaled out the XP totals and tried to make the classes relatively balanced with one another, but in the long run they basically left spells and TBH, the magic system, that really made the caster / Noncaster dichotomy. Way back from the days when it really was not expected player saw levels past 10th was when spells like Gate, Teleport Without Error, Maze, Otto’s Irresistible dance, Imprisonment and Forcecage were placed on the spell lists. Wotc brought them to the new edition and while they tried to balance them individually, they did not realize that spells like those create a huge rift of Have and Have not between the classes at those levels of play.

As I said before, THIS is why 4E levels 1-30 is going to be like 3E levels 3-14.

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

The problem is, strip away a wizards magic items and he's still good to go. Heck, he can replace pretty much any item in the short term just with a few spells.

In 3e, strip away his spell book and he's good to go for a while, but if he can't get it back in time, he is going to be screwed big time. Drop him in an anti-magic area and he becomes pretty useless. In either of these situations the fighter is diminished, but far from useless. These situations are probably as likely as the party being stripped of their magical gear.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

1) Sacrificing Fun on the altar of Fun I am worried about the loss of save-or-sucks.

Mire of Minauros. It hurts your enemies and also goops them in place. There you go. 4E save-or-suck.

2)Anime Names Two Words: Emerald Frost. I have a friend who reads a heck of a lot of anime. He has assured me that this is quite the anime name.

He's wrong. It's a sno-cone flavour.

3)Hit points If these things aren't wounds, then what the heck are they? They've been defined as a character's ability to turn a hit into a miss. So, what distinguishes a hit on HP from a miss? Most games I've played in describe HP as physical wounds, and now it looks like the casters will be shoehorned into damage.

HP have always been described this way. This is only something new if you haven't read the relevant sections in the last three editions.

4) The wizard is now a shadow Looks like the wizard will be stripped of much of his power, so that the fool with the metal stick can compete with the guy who can reshape reality with his mind.

And thank god for that. Three editions we've suffered through that couldn't undo the idea that a wizard should be better in the game than the mundane swordsmen because he's usually more powerful in the fiction than those guys. Wizards currently dominate the game. Now they'll take their rightful place as just another character class.

 

[Odhanan]

I'm still on the fence with that one, because I've seen an off-guard wizard get trounced by a fighter before, and the limits of their spells per day meant they needed to be judicious in their power usage. However, with the new meme of "power all day long," I agree they did need to "nerf" the wizards and clerics to make them more in line with the fighters and rogues.

I agree there, particularly the first part: I've seen fighter-types completely walk over spellcasters in 3.X more than once. There isn't a balance issue for me here: it's an issue of player tactics.

However, if you make the Wizard able to handle more magical stuff all the time, then you've got to reestablish balance somehow by cutting on some raw power output.