D&D 5E Second Wind: Yes or No?

[JamesonCourage]

As an aside, I challenge anyone to come up with a healing mechanics that uses D&D-ish abstract hit points and accomplishes all of the following:

A. There is a finite limit on how much a character can take in a relatively small amount of time, despite external sources of healing being available (such as cure light wounds or potions of healing).

B. The system is elegant, reasonably simple to use and track, and at least nods towards game play and simulation of a typical D&D universe. For example, it's ok for it to support gritty play, but not if the grit excludes more epic play. It's ok for it to model the physics of healing somewhat, but not at the full exclusion of all game decisions.

C. The mechanics do not show much correspondence to the surge mechanics.

I don't think it can be done. If you think me wrong, I'd really like to see your answer.

My RPG uses something I think might fit this. Base instant healing is 'hard' to do (around level 2 spells), but it only converts your the cured HP to nonlethal damage (which can still mean you're passed out or staggered, rather than fine, if you're very badly hurt before healing begins). Also, you can only have so much nonlethal on your before more nonlethal converts to lethal (the nonlethal cap I use is 10 + Con score). (As a side note, in my game, this healing also fatigues you, but that isn't strictly necessary for this answer.)

So, if you have 25 HP and a 10 Con, and take damage down to 5, and heal that damage, you have 25 HP, but 20 nonlethal. Any more healing means it's converted to lethal again -the wounds are trying to be healed, but your body needs rest before it can be healed more, since healing the damage is still kicking the crap out of your body.

So, to go over your guidelines:

A. There is a finite limit on how much a character can take in a relatively small amount of time, despite external sources of healing being available (such as cure light wounds or potions of healing).

Check. You can only heal about 20-30 in a short period of time before you're capped and need to wait hours to heal the nonlethal.

B. The system is elegant, reasonably simple to use and track, and at least nods towards game play and simulation of a typical D&D universe. For example, it's ok for it to support gritty play, but not if the grit excludes more epic play. It's ok for it to model the physics of healing somewhat, but not at the full exclusion of all game decisions.

I think it fits this. Nonlethal has always been easy for me to track, and specialized healers can use more powerful magic to bypass the conversion (or the fatigue, but again, not necessary anyways). If you don't want it, don't use more specialized healing magic.

C. The mechanics do not show much correspondence to the surge mechanics.

They don't look or feel like surges at all, to me. They accomplish some of the same goals, though.

What do you think? Nonlethal too difficult or fiddly to track? Any problems you can see in it? The numbers (like the cap, etc.) can obviously be tweaked to fit 5e instead of my RPG, and I think dials would be easy enough to set. Thoughts? As always, play what you like

 

[Balesir]

I think even from your post it's clear that the problem started before that. There was already a problem when players of the game were thinking in terms of concrete physical wounds, but the rules didn't really reflect that very well. The sensible design direction would have been to create rules that matched the way people were playing and modeled physical wounds.

And several RPG systems took that design route - notably HarnMaster, which does a bang-up job of it.

But that's not the only type of game (or the only type of play style) there is. Not all tables assumed the (nonsensical) idea of hit points as "meat" being hacked away. And, for cinematic or heroic games, hit points - interpreted as mojo, chutzpah, grit and will-to-go-on - are a much better "damage" representation than a more 'realistic' wounding system. In other words, there is room for both types of system in roleplaying games - neither is "superior", they are just good for different purposes.

As regards D&DNext, "wound" systems can be great - but they are totally different from hit point systems. Could/should DDN have a 'wounds' system? Sure, if some folks want it! But the Basic version will be hit points based, simply because that's what D&D always has been. And DDN seems definitely to be an attempt to "build on what we have" rather than "build something new that's good". In many ways I think that's a pity, but it is what it is.

 

[Ratskinner]

As an aside, I challenge anyone to come up with a healing mechanics that uses D&D-ish abstract hit points and accomplishes all of the following:

A. There is a finite limit on how much a character can take in a relatively small amount of time, despite external sources of healing being available (such as cure light wounds or potions of healing).

B. The system is elegant, reasonably simple to use and track, and at least nods towards game play and simulation of a typical D&D universe. For example, it's ok for it to support gritty play, but not if the grit excludes more epic play. It's ok for it to model the physics of healing somewhat, but not at the full exclusion of all game decisions.

C. The mechanics do not show much correspondence to the surge mechanics.

I don't think it can be done. If you think me wrong, I'd really like to see your answer.

I'll give it a go. Although, some of your conditions are rather subjective. I've never playtested this, so the numbers are just speculative. In particular, I'm not sure the penalties are worth their overhead outside a gritty campaign.

1. HP represent the ability to avoid significant injury and continue fighting at full capacity. This is a combination of endurance, experience, determination and luck. Combat generally proceeds as we'd expect.
2. Characters recover all their HP (except as noted below) at the end of a campaign-specific rest period. In different campaigns, this might be at the end of each combat, a 5 minute breather, an overnight rest, or a return to town for a day of R&R.
3. If an attack reduces a character HP to zero or less, or a character with 0 hp is hit, they must make an injury roll of d20 + the excess damage. The result of the roll determines the type of injury they sustain:
   1. <11: Light Wound, -2 penalty, recover up to 75% max hp during recovery
   2. 11-15: Serious Wound, -4 penalty, recover up to 50% of max hp during recovery
   3. 16-20: Critical Wound, -6 penalty, recover up to 25% of max hp during recovery, 50% chance of unconsciousness
   4. 21+: Mortal Wound, character is unconscious and dying. (goto whatever dying rules you prefer)
   • Penalties apply to all checks, saves, attacks, AC, and movement (squares), and are not cumulative. (They do not apply to other injury rolls.)
   • Some creatures, spells, and abilities may specify effects (such as poison, paralysis, etc.) that supersede this chart.
4. Wounds can only be healed through R&R, or various magical effects. A lightly wounded character will recover with 1d6 days of R&R, a seriously wounded character 3d6, and a critically wounded character with 5d6 days of R&R.
   • If under the care of a skilled healer reduce the size of the dice to d4s.
   • Optionally in grittier campaigns, a critically wounded character heals to become seriously wounded and a seriously wounded character heals to be lightly wounded.

Advantages and suggestions for other parts of the game:

• Warlords, Bards, Paladins, etc. could have "rally" abilities that make you capable of fighting longer without "shouting wounds shut".
• No Schrodinger's wounds. You know when you are injured and when you are not.
• Assassinations, or other attacks out of combat can just bypass hp, since they only apply during a fight.
• Similarly, falling and other hazards could skip the hp and go to an injury roll.
• Reduces impact of many SoD effects, since they would only kick in after hp are gone.
• At the design level, "Cure" spells and effects would remove the Wounds, but not recover the hp. Their necessity would be greatly reduced by faster recovery intervals.

Anyway, that's my first draft. I've been thinking about trying something like this in the Old-school game I play in.

 

[Balesir]

What do you think? Nonlethal too difficult or fiddly to track? Any problems you can see in it? The numbers (like the cap, etc.) can obviously be tweaked to fit 5e instead of my RPG, and I think dials would be easy enough to set. Thoughts? As always, play what you like

It looks to me like a viable alternative that just twangs my SoD buttons much as others say surges do for them

Two reasons:

- "Lethal Damage" explicitly points up hit points as "meat", and this makes literally no sense to me. My view of how wounding works (as opposed to the grinding out of "grit") just doesn't gel with this - it's a problem I have with GURPS, even, too.

- Healing can fix up "meat" damage to make it "non-lethal", but can't fix up the non-lethal "general battering" damage?? I'd be forever asking myself why this is so. Rocky's trainer can fix up all his cuts and bruises, but not get him up off the canvas - does not compute, sorry...

But, as you say, play what you like. I do.

 

[Hussar]

I think even from your post it's clear that the problem started before that. There was already a problem when players of the game were thinking in terms of concrete physical wounds, but the rules didn't really reflect that very well. The sensible design direction would have been to create rules that matched the way people were playing and modeled physical wounds.

I mean, it's remarkable that we have rules for dozens of trivially different tricks a fighter can do with a shield (or, if you go back, charts for different weapon vs armor combinations), but the rules don't differentiate a broken leg from a severed artery, let alone fatigue, psychological damage, and "luck". Virtually no design space has been devoted to the enormous list of concepts that hit points can be tied to; they're all just lumped together into one number. Hit points are really bizarre.

Personally, when I'm working on my current vp/wp/injury system, the first thing to me is to make it really clear and discrete and explicit as to what each mechanic means in the context of the game world.

Well, whether or not it was a problem before I think is debatable. After all, since most of the healing was magical, there was never any disconnect. You could describe wounds pretty much any way you liked, knowing that that cleric was going to break out the Holy T'aep of Duhkt and remove the wounds.

And, there's a reason that HP have survived virtually unchanged through several editions - they work and they're easy. One should never overlook just how nice it is to have a system that is easy. I mean, look at GURPS. Now there is a pretty sim based approach to wounds. They try to nail it down as far as possible. But, it makes combat about as interesting as doing taxes.

In a game like D&D where combat is such a central element, that would be a bad thing.

 

[Ahnehnois]

The mind is a very unusual thing, in combat it's even more unusual. Treat it lightly at your own risk.

Indeed. I guess my point was that rolling it in with hit points and simply using it as one more explanation for what happens when they run out is treating it lightly.

 

[Ahnehnois]

And, there's a reason that HP have survived virtually unchanged through several editions - they work and they're easy. One should never overlook just how nice it is to have a system that is easy. I mean, look at GURPS. Now there is a pretty sim based approach to wounds. They try to nail it down as far as possible. But, it makes combat about as interesting as doing taxes.

In a game like D&D where combat is such a central element, that would be a bad thing.

Well, that's true. Then again, a fighter who simply makes an attack roll on his turn, compares it to AC, and rolls damage is "easy" whereas one who selects from a list of powers with three different recharge times (or even one who has some bonus dice and maneuvers each turn) is much harder.

Adding complexity can be a problem, yes, but it can also create a better game experience, so there's a fine balance. The thing that I think is bizarre is that D&D has an enormous number of complicated and difficult rules for magic, combat, character advancement, and even noncombat situations, but has essentially only one rule to describe harm.

But that's not the only type of game (or the only type of play style) there is. Not all tables assumed the (nonsensical) idea of hit points as "meat" being hacked away. And, for cinematic or heroic games, hit points - interpreted as mojo, chutzpah, grit and will-to-go-on - are a much better "damage" representation than a more 'realistic' wounding system. In other words, there is room for both types of system in roleplaying games - neither is "superior", they are just good for different purposes.

As regards D&DNext, "wound" systems can be great - but they are totally different from hit point systems. Could/should DDN have a 'wounds' system? Sure, if some folks want it! But the Basic version will be hit points based, simply because that's what D&D always has been. And DDN seems definitely to be an attempt to "build on what we have" rather than "build something new that's good". In many ways I think that's a pity, but it is what it is.

There are a variety of different ways of approaching health and wounds. Two significant ones with a lot of precedent for D&D are vp/wp and the injury system from Unearthed Arcana. Neither of those systems are especially 'realistic', and neither of them are radically more complex. After all, even with hit points, you have regular and nonlethal/subdual damage. The vp/wp simply takes two types of points and makes the distinction more meaningful and uses them more regularly. In any case, non-hp health systems are not necessarily more complex, more realistic, or less cinematic.

But virtually any alternative offers more design space; more ways for characters to effect harm on their enemies, more ways to be tough and mitigate injuries, more ways for healing to proceed at different rates for different reasons. So, to your last point, I think it's a shame that we're still stuck (at the moment) with hit points. Not that I didn't think they'd be there at all, but health systems I would expect to be one of the most important and fundamental "dials", one that I would have hoped to see explored much more deeply by this point.

 

[D'karr]

Indeed. I guess my point was that rolling it in with hit points and simply using it as one more explanation for what happens when they run out is treating it lightly.

For as simple as the HP system is, it does a pretty good job of being the workhorse for handling all these different things completely abstractly. A more complicated system that took all of these variables into account might be desirable as an option, but IMO it would be unwieldy and definitely not simple.

There is a certain refined elegance to simple and functional.

 

[Ahnehnois]

The other day you asked me

in this thread.

For the same reason that you endorse the above. This is a perfect example. I would hope that the designers fully canvas what HPs mean in the core system and in various vitality modules...and the implications of each in terms of table agenda, overhead and handling time.

You're right. The problem I think is that hit points are so abstract and generalized it's hard to make them objectively mean anything. If you take the straight 'hit points as meat' approach, many D&D rules make no sense. If you don't, than you're acknowledging that you have a rules-heavy combat-heavy rpg that does not have any explicit rules for physical injuries.

In this case, the underlying rule is the problem. The confusion about hit points has allowed different perspectives to flourish. Removing that confusion without changing the rule itself effectively invalidates some of those perspectives (and this happened with 4e to some extent).

In other words, the increased clarity you're advocating would bring with it increased accountability. Rather then leaving the system as it is, the designers would have to address the problems with it. I think that's a good thing, but it's not easy, especially for them.

(Also, I think that the disconnect discussed in the other thread is great when it's about tangential rules. For example, there's usually one XP system, that the game is designed around, but every group has a different take on XP, and most of them don't use the base system. But XP isn't that important. HP is more fundamental, and everyone does need to be on the same page about what hit points, classes, levels, skills, and the other "core" rules mean.)

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

I think it fits this. Nonlethal has always been easy for me to track, and specialized healers can use more powerful magic to bypass the conversion (or the fatigue, but again, not necessary anyways). If you don't want it, don't use more specialized healing magic.

They don't look or feel like surges at all, to me. They accomplish some of the same goals, though.

What do you think? Nonlethal too difficult or fiddly to track? Any problems you can see in it? The numbers (like the cap, etc.) can obviously be tweaked to fit 5e instead of my RPG, and I think dials would be easy enough to set. Thoughts? As always, play what you like

I find this to be fiddly, personally. I never liked tracking non-lethal damage, so I find the application to be rather clunky, but you probably just "get used to it" eventually.

It accomplishes some of the same goals as a surge mechanic, but for me, your system is much less useful, since I use surges to represent other things in my game; they're not just for "healing" - they're an important resource. I use them for fueling ritual magic and for recharging powers. To me, and in my campaigns, they really represent "stamina" in the truest sense.

I also take issue with the HP = meat approach. It just causes the kind of jarring game/fiction disconnect in my brain that CaGI does for others.

I'm not disparaging your approach; clearly for you this works, but it won't work for what I want to do. These are the kind of options I want in the game though; we should both be able to have our way if they do it right

I'll give it a go. Although, some of your conditions are rather subjective. I've never playtested this, so the numbers are just speculative. In particular, I'm not sure the penalties are worth their overhead outside a gritty campaign.

1. HP represent the ability to avoid significant injury and continue fighting at full capacity. This is a combination of endurance, experience, determination and luck. Combat generally proceeds as we'd expect.
2. Characters recover all their HP (except as noted below) at the end of a campaign-specific rest period. In different campaigns, this might be at the end of each combat, a 5 minute breather, an overnight rest, or a return to town for a day of R&R.
3. If an attack reduces a character HP to zero or less, or a character with 0 hp is hit, they must make an injury roll of d20 + the excess damage. The result of the roll determines the type of injury they sustain:
   1. <11: Light Wound, -2 penalty, recover up to 75% max hp during recovery
   2. 11-15: Serious Wound, -4 penalty, recover up to 50% of max hp during recovery
   3. 16-20: Critical Wound, -6 penalty, recover up to 25% of max hp during recovery, 50% chance of unconsciousness
   4. 21+: Mortal Wound, character is unconscious and dying. (goto whatever dying rules you prefer)
   • Penalties apply to all checks, saves, attacks, AC, and movement (squares), and are not cumulative. (They do not apply to other injury rolls.)
   • Some creatures, spells, and abilities may specify effects (such as poison, paralysis, etc.) that supersede this chart.
4. Wounds can only be healed through R&R, or various magical effects. A lightly wounded character will recover with 1d6 days of R&R, a seriously wounded character 3d6, and a critically wounded character with 5d6 days of R&R.
   • If under the care of a skilled healer reduce the size of the dice to d4s.
   • Optionally in grittier campaigns, a critically wounded character heals to become seriously wounded and a seriously wounded character heals to be lightly wounded.

Advantages and suggestions for other parts of the game:

• Warlords, Bards, Paladins, etc. could have "rally" abilities that make you capable of fighting longer without "shouting wounds shut".
• No Schrodinger's wounds. You know when you are injured and when you are not.
• Assassinations, or other attacks out of combat can just bypass hp, since they only apply during a fight.
• Similarly, falling and other hazards could skip the hp and go to an injury roll.
• Reduces impact of many SoD effects, since they would only kick in after hp are gone.
• At the design level, "Cure" spells and effects would remove the Wounds, but not recover the hp. Their necessity would be greatly reduced by faster recovery intervals.

Anyway, that's my first draft. I've been thinking about trying something like this in the Old-school game I play in.

I like this approach much better. Next time I play AD&D I will even suggest that the DM give it a look. It doesn't break my brain with "HP as meat", it's simple, and it is adjustable. It does create a bit of a "Death Spiral" but some folks are okay with that, and in the context of AD&D it probably wouldn't matter as much.

That said, in 4e anything above a light injury would relegate most builds to warming the benches, and in a "bounded accuracy" system like Next is shooting for, any kind of attack penalty is going to make you really feel it. I know the numbers can be "played with" but it would have a major effect on the system assumptions (this is why I think them not factoring magic plusses into the system is a risky proposition).

The downside of this approach for me personally, is the same as the above - it doesn't represent stamina as a resource to spend as well as healing surges do in my current game (I have houserules for this that I posted here). Under this system, I'd have to have a hit point cost to represent recharging and ritual magic, which is doable, since surges also effectively have a converted hit point cost, but a healing surge nicely breaks it down into small, manageable units.

I find there is also less potential here for the "dramatic turnaround" that things like Second Wind with surges can provide. Though, as you say, this can be worked in. I would prefer to do it in non-class specific ways, but there can be options for that, too.

Overall, I think it's a pretty good stab at it!