D&D 5E L&L December 16th Can you feel it?

[Majoru Oakheart]

This is a big part of why I no longer see D&D as appropriate for running story-oriented games. At least with mechanics like Fate points, there's never a reason for the character to be aware of the metagame. HP, and spell slots, and AC, and...well a lot of D&D's little 'abstract' mechanics make it very hard to conceive of a D&D world where the characters aren't keenly genresystem-saavy like the characters of Order of the Stick or Goblins.

Character decisions are just too tied into mechanical information that they have no real reason to be aware of. I can't say how many times (especially back in the day) I saw fighters swinging newly-found magical swords trying to determine if it made their attacks 5% or 10% more accurate (god only knows how they determine its effects on damage, given HP).

I maintain that "No metagaming" is one of the tenants of D&D. That there will always be rules that are not a 1 to 1 correlation with what is happening in the game world because there is always some abstraction. I think "no metagaming" kind of means "Please don't poke or pay attention to the parts of the rules that are abstract. Some of the information YOU as a player have is not shared with your character. Don't have your character make decisions based on this information."

That's actually part of the article's point. Some abstraction is necessary and that finding the right balance where the mechanic is "close enough" while still being fast and easy enough is hard.

I'd argue that hitpoints are a major one of those mechanics. They have the "feel" of taking wounds while not actually being wounds or following all the rules of wounds. The less hp you have, the closer you are to death. The more wounds you suffer the closer you are to death. However, the player knows the EXACT number of hitpoints they have and often knows the EXACT amount of damage things do. The character does not. This means that for the most part, your thought process is the same as your characters: Avoid taking damage because I don't want to die. Sometimes I have to take some damage, but try to minimize the risk by taking as little as possible.

It's only when the player uses the metagame information that the thinking gets out of sync. As long as a DM enforces the "no metagaming" rule, the problem goes away.

 

[steeldragons]

I maintain that "No metagaming" is one of the tenants of D&D. That there will always be rules that are not a 1 to 1 correlation with what is happening in the game world because there is always some abstraction. I think "no metagaming" kind of means "Please don't poke or pay attention to the parts of the rules that are abstract. Some of the information YOU as a player have is not shared with your character. Don't have your character make decisions based on this information."

That's actually part of the article's point. Some abstraction is necessary and that finding the right balance where the mechanic is "close enough" while still being fast and easy enough is hard.

I'd argue that hitpoints are a major one of those mechanics. They have the "feel" of taking wounds while not actually being wounds or following all the rules of wounds. The less hp you have, the closer you are to death. The more wounds you suffer the closer you are to death. However, the player knows the EXACT number of hitpoints they have and often knows the EXACT amount of damage things do. The character does not. This means that for the most part, your thought process is the same as your characters: Avoid taking damage because I don't want to die. Sometimes I have to take some damage, but try to minimize the risk by taking as little as possible.

I don't know that I completely agree...that meta-game knowledge should be left out or leaving it out is intrinsically "D&D".

There are times even in/with [or I suppose I could just say "within"] the abstraction where the player and character knowledge coalesces. The mage "knows" she has almost expended all of her power [the player knows they have 1 or 2 spells left]. Can she get that last spell off and save the day (or just save herself?) or does the player have her run away? Why? Maybe she doesn't possess a spell that can help. The character and player both know this. Maybe the character is a coward or self-important/selfish. The player and the character both know this. The fighter, wiping the blood from his brow, grasps his sword with the last of his vigor and pushes forward with his last breath [the player knows he has 2 HP left, but is looking to be the hero and/or go down in a "blaze of glory" with his last attack]. The player and the character both know/think/want/would act like this.

I don't know that meta-game knowledge is mutually exclusive to character knowledge.

In the case of players ripping apart abstraction to gain something the character would have no way of knowing? Yes, I absolutely agree. But I don't know that a blanket "no metagaming" rule by the DM can really do [or should do] that or that it is something that D&D was automatically designed to do. Some things are known or, at least, "understood/have a feeling about" by both the players and their characters.

 

[billd91]

That explanation of mechanical interaction and fictional positioning is plausible and sensical but a contest of a physical stat versus Will to wrongfoot or goad into conflict is somehow well off the reservation?

This is where I know we are both on opposite ends of the rabbit hole, looking at each other, blinking in disbelief, mutually assured that never the twain shall meet. And not really sure why.

Wrong-footing someone by succeeding in a check against some appropriate defense, save, or opposed check has never been off the reservation - we've had feinting as an action since 3e at least. The question is and always has been for me the plausibility of the wrong-footing, meaning the subset of actions you can successfully goad or wrong-foot someone into performing. And that's all I will say about Come and Get It in this thread.

 

[Manbearcat]

One of the primary reasons this is difficult for me to get my head around is my experience and my understanding is literally the inverse. Setbacks and mental adversity tend to force the mind to focus rather than giving cause to distraction, specifically when it comes to practiced professionals applying their honed discipline/trade/muscle memory. Accidents happen and things go bad when you are mentally complacent and off-guard because something is too easy or routine. Sometimes they happen due to lack of preparation.

Crisis or distraction eroding muscle memory/honed reflexes/poise (etc) leading to ruin makes sense for abject amateurs. Complacency and overconfidence is by far the greater enemy for hardened, practiced professionals. I definitely put Jack the Fighter in the second category when it comes to the athletic endeavor of jumping down a 30 foot ledge.

 

[Ratskinner]

A sprained ankle doesn't need to slow down a big fantasy hero who can push their limits and give it their all 'till the moment they drop dead, though. Lost HP, in a sense, *is* the sprained ankle. It's how you know that the goblin's blade is going to bite deeper than it otherwise would.

You'll pardon me, but I find that that doesn't correspond with reality or genre fiction. It corresponds to exactly one narrative, and I find even that a bit stretched compared to its fictional counterparts. If you find it does so, I guess that's great, but then I'd have to say that HP are far too abstract a mechanism for me. I regularly witness the breakdown and avoidance of narrative whenever HP are involved.

 

[Ratskinner]

It's only when the player uses the metagame information that the thinking gets out of sync. As long as a DM enforces the "no metagaming" rule, the problem goes away.

What if one of the players is one of those who feels that HP aren't a metagame mechanic, that they do, in fact represent "meat". To those folks, the characters do know how many HP they have, and the PCs are aware of their totals. (Heck, its been argued in this thread already.) "Abstract" and "metagame" aren't the same, and declaring HP to be one of those doesn't prevent it from being "lousy".

 

[I'm A Banana]

You'll pardon me, but I find that that doesn't correspond with reality or genre fiction. It corresponds to exactly one narrative, and I find even that a bit stretched compared to its fictional counterparts. If you find it does so, I guess that's great, but then I'd have to say that HP are far too abstract a mechanism for me. I regularly witness the breakdown and avoidance of narrative whenever HP are involved.

I'm not really trying to convince anyone per se. More just describing why it's not necessarily insane to view HP as a mechanic that combines how a heroic fantasy character views the threats they face and how the player of that heroic fantasy character views those threats. How I've done it in D&D since forever. I'm not against alternate HP mechanics, I'm just against being told that I can't possibly be playing the game the way I've been playing the game.

 

[Keldryn]

Yep. The problem isn't that so many things are immune to sneak attack. The problem is that the Rogue is too much of a one-trick pony.

When you walk down a hallway filled with 10 doors and there is a combat encounter behind all 10 of them, the rogue spends about 30 seconds each checking them for traps and disarming. The rest of the party spends 20 minutes fighting each combat encounter.

It's not very fun being the guy who plays the game for 30 seconds every 20 minutes.

I agree with these points regarding the rogue/thief, and there is an obvious parallel with low-level wizards who get a couple of chances to shine and then stand at the back throwing darts with a lousy chance to hit.

However, I believe that the single greatest contributing factor is the amount of time that combat encounters take to resolve, and this is particularly apparent with mid-level 3e and any level of 4e. Playing a few sessions of B/X D&D and AD&D a couple of years ago confirmed this for me. When we played TSR D&D, typical adventuring (i.e. in a dungeon) would consist of 15-20 minute chunks of exploration and interaction with 5 minute encounters in between. In 3e, it would often consist of 20 minute chunks of exploration/interaction where the rogue rolls lots of dice and the wizard casts a spell or two, with 30 minute encounters in between. In 4e, those 15-20 minutes of exploration/interaction were broken up by 60 minute encounters.

When many combat encounters are resolved in 5 minutes or less, and even larger battles rarely take more than 10 minutes, there is far more room for an individual player to be relatively ineffective in certain situations. It's also a short enough period of time that sidelined players can still enjoy watching how things play out for the rest of the group. When even a straightforward encounter starts taking 30 minutes or longer to resolve, you can easily end up with some players spending more than half the night watching everyone else have fun. Even in 4e, where the game is designed to maximize every player's ability to participate, you often end up with players waiting 5 minutes or longer just for their turn to come around again.

It's another case of the unintended consequences of the changes that the 3e designers made to the AD&D rules. When combats were generally resolved quickly and the exploration and social interaction elements of the game didn't involve a bunch of skill rolls, the game was rather good at not sidelining any individual player for a significant amount of real-world time.

When the game moves at a brisk pace from one situation to another, you can get away with some rather unbalanced stuff. Slow that pace down, and the players of the "shine brightly less often" characters can get bored out of their minds very quickly.

 

[Sunseeker]

That's my point. Hit points don't satisfy Mearls's "feel" test.

That's not an objection to hit points. Rather, it's a reason to doubt the merits of the "feel" test, given that this core D&D mechanic does not satisfy it. (There are plenty of others that don't also, I think - like rolling for initiative, and the action economy more generally - but hit points are the most obvious.)

Oh I see, I misunderstood. Of course, it's not very surprising that I don't agree with Mike there. While I look forward to DDN on the whole, I tend to tune out every time he opens his mouth.

 

[Ratskinner]

Ratskinner, what you mention above regarding SoD interacting with HP thresholds is something the 5e devs were fiddling around with for a bit. I think it got some bad feedback from certains groups because either (i) they felt it was too fiddly or (ii) they want SoD to be swingy and punitive and (iii) a strategical win button. Personally, I'm a fan but it took a nosedive off a cliff and got dashed on the rocks.

I remember some talk about it (at least I recall bringing the idea up), but I don't remember it ever getting into a playtest (although I didn't get a chance to play every iteration.) I think that the HP threshold in some spells is some kind of vestige, IIRC. However, I'm sure you're right about the objections that some folks would have to such a thing.