D&D 5E Should 5E have Healing Surges?

[Izumi]

You are DM.
I am playing Conan in your game. I am an X level barbarian with maybe some rogue or fighter depending on which book I most recently read.

I'm killing 20 men at a time. I'm avoiding and absorbing blows left and right that would instantly kill a regular mook.

I'm completely unrealistic.
Suddenly I decide that one group of guys has REALLY pissed me off. I look at you and say, I cast fireball and incinerate them.

What do you reply and why?

You're already killing mooks left and right? You're so overpowered this game is stupid?

You cast 100,000,000d100 Inbaasu-style Fireball upon your foes. Tell me when you're done rolling.

 

[BryonD]

You're already killing mooks left and right? You're so overpowered this game is stupid?

You cast 100,000,000d100 Inbaasu-style Fireball upon your foes. Tell me when you're done rolling.

So are you saying that I've described Conan wrong? Or are you saying that no one who would play the kind of game you advocate should ever consider doing Conan?

 

[Izumi]

So are you saying that I've described Conan wrong? Or are you saying that no one who would play the kind of game you advocate should ever consider doing Conan?

I gave my opinion. You told me what you did, and I told you what you get. Is this a game you want to continue playing?

 

[BryonD]

I gave my opinion. You told me what you did, and I told you what you get. Is this a game you want to continue playing?

Yes, because I want to understand where you are coming from.

If your comment actually represents your assessment of Conan inside a game then you might design a truly awesome game but you should be kept 100 miles away from any actual influence on the specific D&D brand. You may as well suggest changing the rules of basketball, starting with getting rid of all that silly bouncing stuff.

So, will you answer?

 

[Izumi]

Yes, because I want to understand where you are coming from.

If your comment actually represents your assessment of Conan inside a game then you might design a truly awesome game but you should be kept 100 miles away from any actual influence on the specific D&D brand. You may as well suggest changing the rules of basketball, starting with getting rid of all that silly bouncing stuff.

So, will you answer?

Since you were being absurd, I thought it better to give you some dice to roll. Seriously, you need to let people play the game the way they want to play it, and not worry about your precious D&D as you envision it. The designers know what they are doing, and if you don't like it, Change it.

 

[BryonD]

Since you were being absurd, I thought it better to give you some dice to roll. Seriously, you need to let people play the game the way they want to play it, and not worry about your precious D&D as you envision it. The designers know what they are doing, and if you don't like it, Change it.

Wait.

You said:

"it's kinda silly to argue over which unrealistic abstraction is more unrealistic" but now you are calling my position absurd. I can state with absolute sincerity that Conan slaying scores of mooks is a completely unrealistic and I love it. And I can just as strongly say that Conan making his own wounds vanish is ever bit the same absurdity as Conan flinging fireballs.

So which is it? Are all unrealistic things equally exchangeable or not?
By what possible standard are fireballs absurd while thinking wounds closed is just any other unrealistic abstraction that should be blindly accepted?

I loathe the idea of either equally. I find them BOTH absurd and unacceptable. And I LOVE killing scores of mooks.

It is quite ok to embrace one unrealistic thing because it does what the game is supposed to do and reject another unrealistic thing because it is absurd to the idea the game is pursuing.

(And do you still call Conan killing scores of mooks "overpowered" and "stupid", or was that simple hollow posturing?)

 

[Izumi]

Wait.

You said:

"it's kinda silly to argue over which unrealistic abstraction is more unrealistic" but now you are calling my position absurd. I can state with absolute sincerity that Conan slaying scores of mooks is a completely unrealistic and I love it. And I can just as strongly say that Conan making his own wounds vanish is ever bit the same absurdity as Conan flinging fireballs.

So which is it? Are all unrealistic things equally exchangeable or not?
By what possible standard are fireballs absurd while thinking wounds closed is just any other unrealistic abstraction that should be blindly accepted?

I loathe the idea of either equally. I find them BOTH absurd and unacceptable. And I LOVE killing scores of mooks.

It is quite ok to embrace one unrealistic thing because it does what the game is supposed to do and reject another unrealistic thing because it is absurd to the idea the game is pursuing.

(And do you still call Conan killing scores of mooks "overpowered" and "stupid", or was that simple hollow posturing?)

My positions were made very clear in my previous posts on this thread. However, the post you jumped on was merely my agreement that arguing over historical negation of second winds was silly because D&Ds combat system is already far removed from history. I do not like the second wind healing surge mechanics. That's still my position. I like a more traditional D&D that I can house-rule easily.

 

[BryonD]

Your opinion on surges doesn't really matter to my point.
I strongly disagree with the idea that accepting one unrealistic thing makes it unreasonable to accept another unrealistic thing or that rephrasing it as using history to argue against one thing makes history inapplicable arguing against another thing makes the point any stronger.

That same point in either phrasing removes the actual specifics from any context.

It is perfectly valid to selectively accept and reject unrealistic things and it is perfectly valid to selectively embrace and ignore historic evidence. The idea that these things are bad gets tossed around all the time and it is one of those really simple obvious SOUNDING lines that depends on the reader not really thinking it through. In practice what is presented as simple obviously true turns out to be false more often than not.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Did you just compare a football game to actual life or death combat with medieval weapons? You seriously think people can take rests, block, and hold back without being overcome? This kind of misguided notion is exactly why silly and unnecessary munchkin mechanics crept into an RPG descended from a Medieval Wargame. The most successful and feared sword art in Traditional Japan was the Satsuma Han Yakumura Nodachi Jigen Ryuu. It has one technique. That's right, They run screaming and cut at perfect distance on the diagonal. Then they keep doing it until you are overcome. They had no fear, and gave neither quarter or chance for second winds or adequate defenses. Try to understand why the tactic worked, and reconsider what you think you know.

ROFLMAO! Please, spare me the amateur nerd faux expertise about what goes on in combat. there were MANY different sword fighting schools in pre-modern Japan anyway, so I have no clue where you get your 'facts' from.

The thing is they're irrelevant to the discussion at hand. The analogy is between two groups (adventurers and football players) who both engage in stressful activity in an episodic fashion. There are certainly perfectly valid parallels to be drawn, and more importantly the player base is likely to draw its understanding of activity far more from modern sports than from ancient fighting techniques which none of them are familiar with.

Finally, my observation from the admittedly limited perspective of reenactment is that a combatant has a pretty wide latitude when it comes to the degree to which they press the attack or not. A combatant taking a conservative and defensive stance can decrease the intensity of engagement quite significantly. An aggressive offensive aspect can increase the intensity as well. Most combatants will approach competent opponents in a reasonably cautious fashion simply because the consequences of a mistake are rather drastic. Of course you may have your exceptional individuals who are highly aggressive and utterly competent or dismissive of their own safety, but that's best handled by special rules and in any case doesn't change the fact that you could take a Second Wind by dialing back some.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't really think they can do that in 5E, though. When they released 4E a few years ago, they used an "improving the previous edition" approach, and it ended up making a lot of people angry. I hope they don't try to do that again.

So, their pitch to me is "hey, please go buy this less interesting game because we put D&D on the cover and we need your money even though you spent $400 on the better version a couple years ago!". Yeah, I hope whoever takes the D&D license off Hasbro when that works out real well for them has more sense.