Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="sum1els" data-source="post: 9015776" data-attributes="member: 70720">At some point in the last 50 years someone explained Hit Points in D&D as an abstraction of fatigue, injury, and even luck all mashed into one.  Losing a few HP could just mean you got a little more tired during the fight.  (Of course, this could also be from the time when one to-hit roll simulated the effectiveness of an entire minute of combat rather than a single flurry of blows or swing of the sword.)  In a world where a 100 HP warrior is equally effective when fully healed or down to 1 HP, the mechanic of recovering HP by "healing" during a short rest still makes sense.  If you can remove yourself from actual strenuous activity for some time you can catch your breath, stretch out that cramped leg, bind the cut on your arm, wipe the gore out of your eyes, etc. all represented by recovered HP.In plenty of fiction we see spell casters/magic users tire in some way when they use their spells too frequently, especially the more powerful spells.  Actual rest seems a reasonable way to represent recovering this kind of resource as well.Some have indicated that this system inherently causes players to overexert themselves in every encounter, and then immediately rest.  To me this seems like a reasonable strategy, assuming the players are able to actually rest.  What I don't see is the assertion that the system inherently provides players an opportunity to rest.  If you don't want your players to take a short rest between encounters, don't let them!  Also, I don't get the assertion that the world somehow will not react to the fact that the players rested.  The sounds of combat can typically be heard pretty far away, especially in a dungeon setting.  I don't see any reason that enemies further into the dungeon wouldn't have time to prepare for or even counter-attack players who are sitting around having a snack break.  If the adventure lets players rest after every encounter perhaps it's not a symptom of the system being broken as much as the adventure being broken?That said, I don't see any reason there shouldn't also be potions-of-short-rest.  People in a hurry would probably pay a lot for such things, while poorer folks would just need to rest the old-fashioned way.If a party goes full-out battling for a few minutes, taking a few minutes to recover, and then repeating these steps until they are out of HD, healing potions, and spells, then it's possible that their bone-weariness after only a few hours would mean they really couldn't get much more done that day without severe risks.  This also seems reasonable.  If they don't get to someplace secure, they may not be able to long-rest effectively.  If they do, they may find that situations around them have changed since the day before.  I still fail to see how the system is inherently flawed."I'm tired, I need to rest before we take on more trouble," is a concept that's easily understood by most people and serves as a natural framework for a recovery system.  I disagree that it should be jettisoned altogether.  If the current incarnation of the system is leading to undesired play strategies, then perhaps the way resting works should be examined.As for making TTRPGs more like CRPGs, I don't object to using the best concepts from either.  I didn't hate 4e as much as everyone else seems to have (though I did think the classes were a bit over-homogenized in the name of balance, and the action system seemed to reduce player creativity.)  Yes, they are both games after all!  The main thing I object to is the implication that there is any actual role-playing in so-called CRPGs.  But that's probably a separate thread.</blockquote>

Verification