Salvageable Innovations from 4e for Nonenthusiasts

[pawsplay]

Damage reduction isn't unconventional. 15 hit points for a dragon of such power is. That's the unconventional use of hit points I was referring to, especially if you're talking about 3.X edition rules (which you've indicated you prefer to 4e minions, in this very post I'm replying to).

I'll agree that's unconventional for 3e; I think I said so. However, it is not the hit points that are unconventional, only the numbers. 3d design conventions are a separate matter from whether hit points simulate anything. If you want a dragon to drop in a couple of qualified hits, 15 hit points will simulate that perfectly.

 

[pawsplay]

Yes, a monster with a large strength bonus, wielding the largest weapon with the widest damage range and a x3 crit multiplier, can do 36 points of damage.

My point is that a character who expects to survive roughly eight sword, spear, or arrow hits cannot succumb to one. Or two. Or three, or four -- until we add in critical hits. That's the nature of hit points.

I thought I was clear about this. I don't want tough characters to be less tough. I don't want to see hit points reduced.

The nature of hit points is that they're a buffer. If you're able to survive roughly eight sword, spear, or arrow hits -- with 36 hit points it's a 50/50 proposition -- then you won't survive ten -- it drops to 10/90 -- and you have nothing to fear from six -- 93/7.

Other mechanics work differently. If you're able to survive roughly eight sword, spear, or arrow hits because each hit has a one-in-eight chance of taking you out, then your probability of surviving six hits isn't 93 percent; it's just 45 percent. Your chance of surviving eight isn't 50 percent; it's 34 percent. Your chance of surviving ten isn't just 10 percent; it's 26 percent.

By eliminating critical hits, or reducing them, and decreasing the range of possible damage values, you can stabilize the "hits to kill" at virtually any number you want. That is basically where OD&D started, with d6s for damage. By increasing the danger of critical hits, you can increase unpredictability. By increasing the range of typical values, you can increase the tiering versus foes. 3e combat, with its sometimes high crit factors and significant differences between damage dealers of various sorts and archetypes, is considered moderately "swingy."

A character who can survive eight sword hits CAN succumb to one, if the one is a critical hit defined in a nasty enough one, or the person inflicting the one can deal much more damage than normal.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Why is it the wrong stat? Hit Points is a suffering stat. Notice how battered and bloodied protagonists fight as well, if not better, than they do when unwounded. The hero is being whittled down. Qui Gon got whittled down. Boromir, whittled down. Luke Skywalker, whittled twice.

I'm not sure if Boromir is a protagonist, the story doesn't follow him in the way it does Frodo, Merry/Pippin, and Aragorn.

Counterpoints: Hal Jordan in the latest Green Lantern movie, Robocop, Luke Skywalker in Empire Strikes Back, Tony Stark in Iron Man, ... and so forth. The sudden ambush thing ALSO happens, but primarily, when action heroes get knocked out, it's because they were outmatched in Act I and ran out of hit points, or because they were making a heroic sacrifice. What you are saying is really more true for noir heroes and other investigator types.

Yeah, you're right, noir heroes are frequently getting slipped a mickey and the like. I think it's a common device in many forms of pulp fiction, particularly detective pulp, and noir is the more artistically respectable offspring of detective pulp. I was thinking of a couple of scenes in REH's Conan – Conan is KO-ed by a single sling stone to the head in Shadows in the Moonlight, and paralysed by poison in The Scarlet Citadel (he's imprisoned and placed in a D&Dish dungeon) – superhero comics (superhero, ofc, also being the offspring of pulp), and it happens twice within the first 200 pages of Neil Gaiman's American Gods, in fact the first time it literally is chloroform, a terrible cliché.

Another example would be the one you mentioned of Luke Skywalker being taken out by the tusken raider. If we give our heroes lots of hit points even at 1st level, as 4e does, then that can't happen.

This is the problem with hit points – they are too consistent to represent fiction. Heroes are sometimes laid low by a single strike while on other occasions they sustain many wounds and keep on fighting, as Conan does when he battles a Lovecraftian monster in The Slithering Shadow.

The thing seemed to be biting, clawing, crushing and clubbing him all at the same time. He felt fangs and talons rend his flesh; flabby cables that were yet hard as iron encircled his limbs and body, and worse than all, something like a whip of scorpions fell again and again across his shoulders, back and breast, tearing the skin and filling his veins with a poison that was like liquid fire.​

That's not normal.

In the final fight in Return of the Jedi, Luke beats up Vader by whaling on him. as I consider that the definative cinematic fight scence, it trumps all other examples including and perhaps especially Terminator films. Termintor films have their own set of tropes, including a huge overlap with Arnold cliches.

The 'special move' as a fight finisher is very common in genres that have extended fight scenes between hero and villain. The kick on to the spear in Enter The Dragon (after a fight where both combatants receive a number of blows that draw blood), the Thing using Mr Fantastic as a slingshot to take out Galactus(!) in Fantastic Four #243. The monster in The Slithering Shadow goes over the edge of a cliff, it isn't just one more knife thrust from Conan. In fact going over a cliff is a very popular method of villain dispatch.

It's dramatically necessary. When we've seen two fighters whaling on each other for a period, the fight simply can't end with more whaling. Something else must be brought in to break the deadlock.

Which is exactly what happens in fights that may seem to be ended by 'just more whaling' – Return of the Jedi and Spidey's relentless barrage of punches defeating the Green Goblin in Amazing Spider-Man #122. In both cases the hero has a surge of energy, the tide turns. Luke is enraged, and empowered, by Vader threatening his sister. Spider-Man is enraged when the Goblin disparages the girlfriend he murdered, Gwen Stacey. What is going on there is not just one more punch, there's more to it than that. But with hit points that's all it takes. Stories work by different rules.

I checked out the light sabre battle at the end of Return of the Jedi and I find it hard to see where hit points come into it. The fight is almost all light sabre parrying (and some dodging) and a couple of special moves – Luke kicks Vader down the steps, and Vader hurls his weapon, taking out the supports of the gang plank Luke's standing on. There's a game of cat and mouse as Darth searches for his prey and then – the key event – Vader mentions Luke's sister, at which point he becomes enraged. Luke does whale on Vader but it's still all parrying, until his father falls on one knee and he cuts off his hand. The emperor's lightning isn't hit point depletion – Luke is in agony, unable to fight back as he is zapped, which isn't how hit points work. It looks to me more like necessary Suffering before the bad guy can be defeated.

From a story point of view, Luke is experiencing conflict between Love(Friends and Family) and Love(Friends and Family) – it's both the source of his power and what might cause him to fall. The emperor's taunting is boosting the negative side. For Vader it's Love(Family) versus Loyalty(Emperor) or perhaps just the Dark Side itself. Seeing his son tortured gives a big boost to the former and/or lowers the latter. On this interpretation all the sabre whacking is pretty irrelevant, that's just a vehicle for the expression of emotion.

This might look Narrativist but, as I understand it, it isn't. In a Nar game, the player must make the key decisions, not the dice. If giving into the Dark Side is truly a viable moral option, which it wouldn't seem to be, then the player must choose.

One could say that all the parried blows and dodging are hit point depletion. I believe that such an abstract interpretation lessens the utility of hit points as a mechanic for simulating fiction. After all, we still want hit points to do the job of Suffering, to be real physical damage. This means that the participants, the GM and players, are doing all the work – the interpretation – while the mechanic is being lazy. It doesn't mean anything, and if it doesn't mean anything then it doesn't simulate.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Regarding Tolkien's influence, Gary discusses it in an article in Dragon #95. It's plain he didn't enjoy LotR, preferring pulp fiction such as REH's Conan. However he pretty clearly understates Tolkien's influence on D&D. He admits ents/treants, orcs and hobbits/halflings but doesn't mention rangers, balrogs/balor, worgs, wights, goblins, werebears, half-elves, half-orcs, the Battle of the Pelennor Fields/Emridy Meadows and Sauron/Mordor as a source for Iuz. He denies that D&D dwarves and elves are influenced by Tolkien, which I don't think is true, though stronger with the former than the latter.

 

[pawsplay]

Regarding Tolkien's influence, Gary discusses it in an article in Dragon #95. It's plain he didn't enjoy LotR, preferring pulp fiction such as REH's Conan. However he pretty clearly understates Tolkien's influence on D&D. He admits ents/treants, orcs and hobbits/halflings but doesn't mention rangers, balrogs/balor, worgs, wights, goblins, werebears, half-elves, half-orcs, the Battle of the Pelennor Fields/Emridy Meadows and Sauron/Mordor as a source for Iuz.

Actually, AD&D half-elves and half-orcs are completely different than anything in Tolkien. In Tolkien, being a half-elf isn't a genetic condition, it's a combination of hereditity and the free will of men; Elrond is a "half-elf" which is basically just a regular elf with a different secret origin. Also, there are only a handful of half-elves in all of Middle Earth history. Half-orcs in ME are Saruman's invention, possibly through sorcery, and can pass for human. They are uniformly cunning, and it's hinted many are sorcerers. In AD&D, most half-orcs are simply less bestial orcs, with only a minority being similar enough in appearance and behavior to blend with human societies (PC half-orcs being assumed to be in that category).

Balrog/balor is cute, but balor also sounds like Baal, which is a word meaning "lord" and is often used in reference to heathen deities during the Biblical era. E.g. Baal-ze-bub, "lord of the flies." Both balrogs and balors clearly draw inspiration from Renaissance tapestries and paintings representing the Abyss.

He denies that D&D dwarves and elves are influenced by Tolkien, which I don't think is true, though stronger with the former than the latter.

D&D dwarves and elves are very different. Dwarves, in ME, are materialistic creatures fond of beer and roast meat who are renowned as makers of magical toys. Gimli is a notale archer, though no match for an elf. Dwarves, in D&D, are pious, subterranean beings who abhor magic. A "dwarf ranger" is a bit of a joke in AD&D terms.

Tolkien's elves are wise, full of ennui, tall, grand, powerful warriors. D&D elves are small, delicate, whimsical, and sorcerous.

 

[pawsplay]

I'm not sure if Boromir is a protagonist, the story doesn't follow him in the way it does Frodo, Merry/Pippin, and Aragorn.

He dies. That definitely puts a damper on his heroic activities thereafter. Trying to determine who is a "protagonist" or not in RPG terms is a fun but aimless exercise. It's enough that he's "PC-like."

Another example would be the one you mentioned of Luke Skywalker being taken out by the tusken raider. If we give our heroes lots of hit points even at 1st level, as 4e does, then that can't happen.

I think giving 1st level characters a lot of hit points, as 4e does, is usually not a good idea, partially for that reason. Usually, fresh-faced young heroes are in great danger of getting whupped in their early adventures.

This is the problem with hit points – they are too consistent to represent fiction. Heroes are sometimes laid low by a single strike while on other occasions they sustain many wounds and keep on fighting, as Conan does when he battles a Lovecraftian monster in The Slithering Shadow.

How is that a problem? You don't actually know how many hit points he is taking, or what other mechanics are in play.

The 'special move' as a fight finisher is very common in genres that have extended fight scenes between hero and villain. The kick on to the spear in Enter The Dragon (after a fight where both combatants receive a number of blows that draw blood), the Thing using Mr Fantastic as a slingshot to take out Galactus(!) in Fantastic Four #243. The monster in The Slithering Shadow goes over the edge of a cliff, it isn't just one more knife thrust from Conan. In fact going over a cliff is a very popular method of villain dispatch.

One way of looking at that would be after tangling and doing hit point damage for a while, the villain loses awareness of other threats.

It's dramatically necessary. When we've seen two fighters whaling on each other for a period, the fight simply can't end with more whaling. Something else must be brought in to break the deadlock.

Which is exactly what happens in fights that may seem to be ended by 'just more whaling' – Return of the Jedi and Spidey's relentless barrage of punches defeating the Green Goblin in Amazing Spider-Man #122. In both cases the hero has a surge of energy, the tide turns. Luke is enraged, and empowered, by Vader threatening his sister. Spider-Man is enraged when the Goblin disparages the girlfriend he murdered, Gwen Stacey. What is going on there is not just one more punch, there's more to it than that. But with hit points that's all it takes. Stories work by different rules.

That's fiction-first. I prefer dice-first. When Sipder-Man punches the heck out of Green Goblin, that is when he has depleted the GG's hit points.

I checked out the light sabre battle at the end of Return of the Jedi and I find it hard to see where hit points come into it. The fight is almost all light sabre parrying (and some dodging) and a couple of special moves – Luke kicks Vader down the steps, and Vader hurls his weapon, taking out the supports of the gang plank Luke's standing on. There's a game of cat and mouse as Darth searches for his prey and then – the key event – Vader mentions Luke's sister, at which point he becomes enraged. Luke does whale on Vader but it's still all parrying, until his father falls on one knee and he cuts off his hand. The emperor's lightning isn't hit point depletion – Luke is in agony, unable to fight back as he is zapped, which isn't how hit points work. It looks to me more like necessary Suffering before the bad guy can be defeated.

To me, it looks like Luke losing a lot of hit points, maybe getting stunned, and not being able to hit the Emperor with an attack.

From a story point of view, Luke is experiencing conflict between Love(Friends and Family) and Love(Friends and Family) – it's both the source of his power and what might cause him to fall. The emperor's taunting is boosting the negative side. For Vader it's Love(Family) versus Loyalty(Emperor) or perhaps just the Dark Side itself. Seeing his son tortured gives a big boost to the former and/or lowers the latter. On this interpretation all the sabre whacking is pretty irrelevant, that's just a vehicle for the expression of emotion.

In my view, Luke isn't dying of inner conflict. He's resolved that. He may live, he may die, and he's accepted his destiny. He may experience conflict, but maily, he's losing hit points.

One could say that all the parried blows and dodging are hit point depletion. I believe that such an abstract interpretation lessens the utility of hit points as a mechanic for simulating fiction.

Why?

After all, we still want hit points to do the job of Suffering, to be real physical damage. This means that the participants, the GM and players, are doing all the work – the interpretation – while the mechanic is being lazy. It doesn't mean anything, and if it doesn't mean anything then it doesn't simulate.

That's backwards. Hit points are measuring suffering. Real physical damage is only one symptom of suffering. One bonus of hit points is that the player is losing a game resource. That increases identification with the PC. "I'm losing my hit points!" induces a sense of urgency and danger. That helps simulate rising action. Simulation (and this is something that is largely absent in Forgie discussions) has a lot to do with immersion and emotional contact with the imaginary events.

 

[Celebrim]

This is the problem with hit points – they are too consistent to represent fiction.

I'm not strongly tied to a notion that hit points are primarily simulationist, although I would accept that they are a sufficiently robust system that they can be tweaked to simulate certain sorts of literature. However, the problem with the statement that hit points are too consistent to represent fiction is that it probably could be broaded to say that no single RPG system is capable of representing all fiction and some sorts of fiction may not in fact be reproduced within a game because they depend on heroes behaving in ways that gamers are highly reluctant to act. In some sorts of fiction, heroes fall for certain cliched tropes where gamers will be reluctant to accept failure. Even if you promise via the system that the protagonists will enjoy the same sort of plot protection enjoyed by literary heroes, the result is still likely to be a gamer that balks at accepting failure as something he must do or else balks at accepting that the game must procede along predictable lines.

Its hard to escape the problem that in literature things happen solely because the author wants them to and that very few authors have a game like desire to make their story have internally consist rules rather than the mere gloss of versimilitude.

It's equally hard to have a game maintain the necessary lack of linearity people enjoy in a game and have the plot come out in a predictable literary like arc, especially if it is a particular arc that you want to simulate.

So while your objection is true, I'm not sure that it is that big of an objection nonetheless simply because I'm not sure that its possible to completely transfer the rules by which stories work over to game rules. Hit points are I think a comprimise between simulating a diverse set of stories with different rules (wherein the protagonists seem to enjoy very different levels of plot protection) and maintaining an interesting game.

D&D simulates some sorts of literature and fights of attrition generally very well. D&D simulates some others - notably highly visual cinematic literature like you get from movies or to a lesser extent comic books - very poorly in the details less because of the hit points themselves than the fact it pays little attention to the concrete details of the fight. It's the granularity of a round (or lack of it) that is most responcible for D&D not simulating cinematic combat, and not hit points in and of themselves. After all, its easy to imagine to system with both lots of parrys and dodging and also hit points (either a few or many as appropriate to the fiction) which would better simulate cinematic combat than D&D.

 

[NewJeffCT]

Balrog/balor is cute, but balor also sounds like Baal, which is a word meaning "lord" and is often used in reference to heathen deities during the Biblical era. E.g. Baal-ze-bub, "lord of the flies." Both balrogs and balors clearly draw inspiration from Renaissance tapestries and paintings representing the Abyss.

D&D dwarves and elves are very different. Dwarves, in ME, are materialistic creatures fond of beer and roast meat who are renowned as makers of magical toys. Gimli is a notale archer, though no match for an elf. Dwarves, in D&D, are pious, subterranean beings who abhor magic. A "dwarf ranger" is a bit of a joke in AD&D terms.

Tolkien's elves are wise, full of ennui, tall, grand, powerful warriors. D&D elves are small, delicate, whimsical, and sorcerous.

The D&D balor is pretty clearly directly descended from the Tolkien balrog, right down to them both wielding whips and swords.

The problem is that Tolkien has had such an overwhelming influence on fantasy literature over the last 50 years or so that many of the Tolkien innovations are now considered standard for fantasy in general... was there even a such thing as a half-orc or half-elf before Tolkien? Were there adventuring parties made up of humans, elves, dwarves & hobbits before Tolkien?

 

[mmadsen]

No session of 4e is going to convince me that the Elf/Eladrin split is a good idea, that 1st level "elf" PCs should have magical teleports, or that tieflings or dragonborn are plausible core races for any of the campaigns that interest me.

I agree completely with Pawsplay that those were major changes to the flavor of the game -- and I agree with Redbadge's original point that those were just flavor changes:

4e isn't about any of those things. That's the trappings and WotC's presentations getting in the way.

I can't say I fully share (or understand) this list of core 4E "innovations":

1. Customizable roles/characters using defined mechanics
2. A story resolution mechanic typically referred to as d20
3. Defined actions or choices available to a character during a "round" using an established action economy
4. Options for every type of character that consist of effective and flavorful options that can be utilized at-will, once per "encounter"/scene...

I think the 4E designers made a valiant effort to study the game as a game and to understand the trade-offs players actually make while playing. Where they failed to meet my needs is in translating those gamist insights into plausible simulationist mechanics that wouldn't break my suspension of disbelief and immersion.

So, a designer could take the innovation of giving fighters non-magical powers and implement it quite differently to create something more to my taste than either 3E or 4E.

One of the biggest clashes between my taste and 4E's philosophy is the way it conflates player choices and character choices, so the character seemingly knows he can perform certain feats exactly once per encounter or day and makes certain choices to maximize abstract hit-point "damage" that isn't damage against enemies while "healing" allies who aren't hurt, etc., in surprisingly concrete ways that don't match the abstraction of the hit-point scale.

I think the innovation of explicitly using hit points for something other than actual damage was a fine idea, but it would have worked better if they'd truly divorced it from physical damage and avoided terms like "healing surge", etc.

 

[pawsplay]

I agree completely with Pawsplay that those were major changes to the flavor of the game -- and I agree with Redbadge's original point that those were just flavor changes:

I think it would be pretty trivial re-skin D&D such that it was no longer D&D.