My take.

[Li Shenron]

Thanks for the interesting thread.

Worrying about the game reality is in context really silly. What do hit points represent? Doesn't matter. They are a game resource, and thats really all that matters. Worrying about the larger universe in which the game is taking place is fundamentally pointless. Does the game imply a universe where people are never injured for more than a few hours? Sure, but in the context of the game, so what? And that is as a design is just fine for a game.

The dispute between realism and gamism is really unsolvable. It's a bit like an argument between two political or religious ideology: the two parties have some fundamentally different assumptions that won't make them meet.

I liked D&D since the start as a rule system, but I cannot play with a ruleset that completely defies some element of realism, at least the one which I have on my mind. It's hard to explain, but I know it when I see it!

I'll make an example.

If I play in a game where they tell me that your characters resurrect automatically every time they die (like in a computer game) albeit with some fastidious penalties, I would hate such game.
If I play in a game where the PCs go to Ysgard, the "afterlife of warriors", where auto-resurrect happens, but that's because those people are already dead and this is how afterlife works... then I'd love an adventure or two in such a place!

But eventually someone will have to tell me how does "everyday life" in Ysgard works, and I expect that to be very different from real life (although it could be just fighting over and over). If someone wanted to fit the auto-resurrect idea into a normal world (even with magic), trying to keep the life unaffected by it, then it simply wouldn't cut it for me.

It's not that I don't like playing abstract games.

It's just that for me to play a roleplay game means to play a game where you "transpose" yourself into a character and pretend to be there, in the middle of the adventure, yourself.

And to do that, I expect the rules to serve the adventures and the setting, and not the adventures and the setting to serve the rules.

 

[apiratto]

But "Make Stuff Up" is not a rule.

So, what would we be paying the designers for, again?

you seem to have glossed over the details of my remarks in favor of a straw man, so i'll try to clarify:

the rules are there to provide a framework for adjudicating situations involving conflict or risk of failure. systematized rules are there to make judgments easier and more consistent. but ultimately adherence to any particular rule is trumped by narrative and logical considerations, according to the preferences of the gaming group. that is officially written into the core rulebooks of 3rd edition (as if we needed WotC to tell us that we're free to use the rules selectively!), and we'll surely be reminded of this in the 4th edition PHB. the rules, as offered, are designed to provide a framework for adjudicating the majority of situations that will come up. the healing rules, for instance, would not be as they are if it were not assumed that there is normally a magical healer in the party.

in most cases, the rules as stated do a fine job. but there was never any pretense made to their ability to handle every possible circumstance, and for cases where the vision of the gaming group conflicts with what the rules say, adjudicate on the fly.

i always understood the chief virtue of the d20 system to be its flexibility with regard to on-the-fly adjudication. basically, "when in doubt, roll a d20, apply modifiers based on the character's traits, and compare it against a DC determined by the difficulty of the task".

And what would be more work, adopting the good parts in 4e for 3.x play, or using the Fiat Machine on 4e whenever it proved to be not up to the task?

I'm thinking the first option is probably more palatable to a lot of people.

frankly, i don't think you want to argue the question of what would be more work. i'm sure it would be more laborious to try to splice 4e with 3e rules than to use 4e rules with occasional ad-hoc deviations and a house-rule here and there. indeed, on-the-fly adjudication is an absolutely necessary part of 3e as well, but even if you somehow completely avoided deviating from what is explicitly written in the 3e rulebooks, just playing the game itself involves a ton of work (especially for DMs). at least on the DM's side of things, it's pretty clear that 4e involves doing much less work (be it designing encounters, awarding loot, creating new monsters and npcs, using traps, etc.).

i have my gripes about 4e for sure, but the "fiat machine" is there whether or not you decide to play 4e. and compared to 3e, it's looking that in standard cases where complex judgments are required (i.e. combat, social challenges, traps, and most skill checks), 4e seems to afford a higher degree of balance, participation, and ease of management. niggling points of contention with the standard rules are just a fact of life in any RPG, and, in 4e as much as anywhere else, can be dealt with as the gaming group sees fit, without nearly as much fuss as seems to be being made about it here.

i for one plan to develop house rules to flavor the game to my liking (as i always do), and i'm sure 3rd party publishers (and even WotC) will, over time, present plenty of alternative rule options. if you prefer 3e, that's great, but as much as i enjoy d&d, i for one find 3e virtually unplayable at high levels, and chock full of rules that need to be changed or circumvented on all levels of play.

 

[Betote]

Oh, and the reason 6 hours of rest heals all wounds is that regardless of how many barriers the game system puts into resting, players don't go forward with the adventure until they are at full resources. If it required a week of rest, players would be resting for a week half way through a dungeon. Rather than breaking every adventure out there whenever players run into trouble, it's easier to make the bar low for parties to heal up. You can believe that a player can get 4x hp in healing surges a day, but not that 6 hours of rest can heal them?

I've always thought the "stay in bed until fully healed, no matter how much time it takes" and the dreaded "15-minutes workday" are not rules problems, but adventure designing problems. If your concept of "adventure" is "a dungeon with completely isolated rooms where everybody just stands waiting for somebody to come, kill them and take heir stuff", you will surely face these "problems".

But if you are running a dinamic adventure where NPCs actually react to PCs' actions (or, even better, show their own initiative), you begin seeing how PCs start worrying about leaving the dungeon alone to be refilled while they're out, or waiting too much to act and letting the bad guys have their way.

 

[AllisterH]

Barring magical intervention that never fails to intervene so that the above scenario never actually happens, yes. Is it important to you that highly improbable things that will never effect the players be nonetheless possible?

The practical effect of making "magical" healing required for everything is to make magical healing trite and taken for granted. Adventurers in 3rd edition didn't lie around in bed for months at a time, they downed miraculous healing potions like gatorade, invested in magic "make-better" sticks, or, if really desperate, hit the sack and gave the Cleric 8 hours to get his magic mojo back so he could, like he did every morning, call upon his phenomenal divine power to make everyone all better again. Even at low levels, the only long-term injuries were stuff like ability damage, and that's only because the party cleric hadn't learned lesser restoration yet.

This is a different sort of flavor, but one that I'd hesitate to call flatly superior. At least the healing surge system introduces the notion that there is only so much abuse a persons body can take in a day, no matter how many healing wands and cure-all potions they've got in their backpack.

This is the thing I wonder about the various house rules.

In 1e/2e, it took days to heal but what would ACTUALLY happen was
a) Cleric on the next day would simply blow all their slots on healing
b) DM would say "ok a week has passed, everyone is back to full".


No-one actually roleplayed the healing downtime and the only scenario where it became an issue was a time-sensitive one (BBEG is going to complete his ritual in 3 days) but even there, thanks to the cleric, it would usually just take 1 day of downtime.

The only time sensitive one would be a scenario where it happens on the same day but this also works in the 4E "6 hours of rest" healing scheme.

So, if healing actually takes say a week, are these houserules actually going to make a difference in the game itself?

 

[I'm A Banana]

While technically true, many of us have been running games with houserules for a great many years. It is therefore hard for us to dredge up a great deal of sympathy for someone who insists that it is unfair for them to have to houserule a matter of slight and frankly idiosyncratic importance.

It comes across rather like a wealthy child at summer camp complaining bitterly to all his middle and lower class campmates about having to do without his butler.

The need for house rules is not a reason to buy 4e, though. Indeed, there's enough house rules or even PUBLISHED rules out there that can solve any problem you have with 3e, or even 2e, or 1e, or OD&D.

To persuade some into the new edition, it needs to require less houserules, or at least less onerous ones than fixing their current game of choice.

4e does seem to be failing that, largely because some design decisions have abandoned the reason that some people play the game in favor of how WotC sees the majority of people playing the game.

 

[AllisterH]

I've always thought the "stay in bed until fully healed, no matter how much time it takes" and the dreaded "15-minutes workday" are not rules problems, but adventure designing powers. If your concept of "adventure" is "a dungeon with completely isolated rooms where everybody just stands waiting for somebody to come, kill them and take heir stuff", you will surely face these "problems".

But if you are running a dinamic adventure where NPCs actually react to PCs' actions (or, even better, show their own initiative), you begin seeing how PCs start worrying about leaving the dungeon alone to be refilled while they're out, or waiting too much to act and letting the bad guys have their way.

Would though the dungeon refill in one day though?

Say for example you have a dungeon and the PC party after exhausting their healing decides to leave. Unless the Dungeon itself refills in a day (where did these monsters come from in such a short time), the PCs will be back at the dungeon in such a short time frame (two days) that even though the monsters in the dungeon have reacted, the dungeon itself won't be refilled.

Similarly, if this is a time sensitive adventure (BBEG completes ritual and world goes BOOM), you can still do this in the 4E method since you simply shrink the time required for the BBEG. The same thing happens in previous editions since if the ritual only takes 2 days, thanks to healing, the PC still have one full day to stop it.

You basically have to have the time sensitive ritual be stopped on the same day.

 

[Cadfan]

The need for house rules is not a reason to buy 4e, though.

I have two responses to this.

First, the reason to buy 4e is whether you think its better than whatever else you could be playing, relative to the cost of upgrading in money and time. This is a issue of balancing positives and negatives. Feeling that you need to houserule something is a negative. HOW MUCH of a negative is naturally relevant.

Second, I think we can safely agree that we have LONG AGO passed from discussing individual persons' reasons for moving or not moving to 4e, and are instead discussing its qualities as a system. Or at least its value as a system for a particular playstyle.

 

[JRRNeiklot]

Barring magical intervention that never fails to intervene so that the above scenario never actually happens, yes. Is it important to you that highly improbable things that will never effect the players be nonetheless possible?

The practical effect of making "magical" healing required for everything is to make magical healing trite and taken for granted. Adventurers in 3rd edition didn't lie around in bed for months at a time, they downed miraculous healing potions like gatorade, invested in magic "make-better" sticks, or, if really desperate, hit the sack and gave the Cleric 8 hours to get his magic mojo back so he could, like he did every morning, call upon his phenomenal divine power to make everyone all better again. Even at low levels, the only long-term injuries were stuff like ability damage, and that's only because the party cleric hadn't learned lesser restoration yet.

Yeah, they got that wrong in 3e, as well. The original Death's Door rule, left you bleeding out until healed. Then you regained one hit point and that was it. Further healing did no good whatsoever until you had one full day of rest. And all spells were wiped from your mind from the shock of nearly dying. Without that full day of rest, you were useless. This is the way it should be. Going from the brink of death to full strength, jumping back up and right back into the fray (barring high level magical intervention, such as a heal spell) ruins my suspension of disbelief.

 

[Incenjucar]

Going from the brink of death to full strength, jumping back up and right back into the fray (barring high level magical intervention, such as a heal spell) ruins my suspension of disbelief.

Thankfully for me, this is my idea of a hero: http://www.the-isb.com/images/ASM33-Lift.jpg

 

[Betote]

Would though the dungeon refill in one day though?

Say for example you have a dungeon and the PC party after exhausting their healing decides to leave. Unless the Dungeon itself refills in a day (where did these monsters come from in such a short time), the PCs will be back at the dungeon in such a short time frame (two days) that even though the monsters in the dungeon have reacted, the dungeon itself won't be refilled.

Refilled as in "push reset button"? No.

Fallen combatants attended by evil clerics, traps set to welcome the not-so-unexpected-now intruders? Most probably.

Dungeon inhabitants retaliating by attacking and setting on fire the nearest town, so as the PCs know that all those innocent men, women and children have been slaughtered because of their inaction? If the DM is as sadist as I am, maybe

Similarly, if this is a time sensitive adventure (BBEG completes ritual and world goes BOOM), you can still do this in the 4E method since you simply shrink the time required for the BBEG. The same thing happens in previous editions since if the ritual only takes 2 days, thanks to healing, the PC still have one full day to stop it.

You basically have to have the time sensitive ritual be stopped on the same day.

So, "make the clock tick faster" would be the solution... to a problem that wouldn't exist if the "rest button" hadn't been implemented. My solution would be just not implementing that button, thus not creating the problem in the first place.

Not to forget the "clock" isn't always something easily sped up...
"We have to find the cure before the illness extends" - "Make the illnes kill in minutes"
"The orcs are amassing an army. Let's put them down while they're few" - "The other armies run really fast"
"This is the day the planes align themselves and Cthulhu comes" - "It's Chtulhu Happy Hour".