D&D 5E Should the Fighter's "Second Wind" ability grant temporary HP instead of regular HP?

[Ruin Explorer]

To be fair, Mearls did explicitly say that if a DM allows chained short rests, there are probably other things in the game that break as well.

Jesus, really? That's not very sound game design, especially when there's an option to make them 5-minute. That's outright bad design, in fact. That's getting into "Actually I shouldn't even buy this..." territory (whereas so far 5E has mostly been "Might not be perfect but should be fun"), because trying to stop the party from ever resting more than once is just going to require ultra-shenanigans.

Ahh, that's not what I was trying to quite get at. I think what you'll see is that short rest is the dial that a group can tinker with to move between the "base" game and a "4E" style game with encounter powers and 5 minute rests. If you set up, say, fighter abilities and cleric abilities and wizard abilities that come back on a short rest and a long rest, then a group that wanted to play a more 4E style game with encounter powers and encounter refreshing abilities would be able to dial short rests to 5 minutes, and a hit dice now heals the maximum amount on each die, meaning that you can heal up to full between encounters much easier by using your hit dice.

(4E is the edition I've played the most by faaaaaaaaar)

That makes a bit more sense, thanks. It was just odd in the context of the lame-o weakass infini healz.

 

[Chaltab]

If 5E wants to be the game that brings everything together it must retain appeal to 4E preferences while also retaining appeal to other tastes. This specific point clearly defaults to the 4E side of things. And whether the 100% recovery is key to that taste or a coincidental side-effect is not really important. But when the default falls to the 4E side, the options need to strongly allow for alternatives, while still cleanly working as a strong overall system. If it does, then which way is default is completely insignificant. But it does motivate the non-default side to ask the question.

Why is that (the bolded) the case? Because some of the defaults of Next certainly fall much more in favor of other editions. The class-as-package-buy system is a much more substantial design choice for the game than how fast the characters heal, but I don't recall any 4E fans insisting that WOTC should provide for alternate multiclassing rules. I don't even think Hybrid Classes are a doable thing when class features and powers are structured so differently. To me it hardly seems either of these are necessary things for WOTC to provide this early. If I find myself in a position of DMing Next, I'll simply ban multiclassing until WOTC or other players create a satisfying hack for it. And anyone who finds healing to be too fast could simply say "Okay, instead you heal 50% HP at a long rest, or 25%," or whatever number you think is reasonable.

Regardless, I don't want to come off as saying your concern is illegitimate, because, hell, sometimes I've wished for less durability on the part of my party in my 4E game. I think I've dropped a defender once with actual enemies. (One defender was dropped by another party member who decided rolling bombs under the belly of a lizard monster the defender was fighting was a great idea, but I digress.)

I just think criticizing something as '4E-style' or '3E-style' without elaborating on what that means is kind of imprecise. Even the things DDN lifts from older editions are sometimes quite different in implementation.

 

[Cybit]

Jesus, really? That's not very sound game design, especially when there's an option to make them 5-minute. That's outright bad design, in fact. That's getting into "Actually I shouldn't even buy this..." territory (whereas so far 5E has mostly been "Might not be perfect but should be fun"), because trying to stop the party from ever resting more than once is just going to require ultra-shenanigans.

It sounds way worse on paper then in reality (having been playing 3 NEXT sessions a week for months if not years now) due to the following bits

1) Rules as Written say that Short Rests are 1 or more hours; so they have to "stop" resting, and then "rest again". So there are some hijinks involved in restarting short rests.

2) The amount of time needed to recover up to full goes up exponentially each level, and by the time you hit 5th level or so, you need to "chain" like 5-6 hours worth of rests. If the party can chain that many rests together, they are most likely to be able to just take a long rest altogether and just regain everything anyway.

3) Frankly, even if the party does heal up to full between every fight; it doesn't really trivialize the encounters as much as one would suspect. I'm pretty loose and fast with healing and recovery between fights, and I've had no issues challenging my players with pre-made fights.

4) Any kind of time pressure / monster pressure (random encounters) has the potential to absolutely hose this and cause massive issues for the party (for instance, they burn those resources right before they run into something). If the players don't have those kinds of pressures, they can alternatively just do 5MWD and make this all a moot point. Heck, even just rolling wandering monsters a single time usually keeps players enough on edge to not try it.

5) Because the abilities are so useful to have in a fight, they end up having to spend an extra hour to get it back. So one uses up most of the day resting at that point.

5E is definitely in the "not perfect, but hella fun and worth it" mode for me. As someone whose favorite edition was 4E (I'm perpetual DM, so 3E is terrible for me from a DM'ing standpoint), I am surprised to have found out that 5E has become my new favorite edition by a country mile. I'd encourage folks to try it out throughout the year (especially once the DMG comes out); I think people will be able to find what they like supported fairly well, especially with the DMG if you have your specific playstyle already figured out.

That makes a bit more sense, thanks. It was just odd in the context of the lame-o weakass infini healz.

Ahh, my apologies. Not always good with my words.

EDIT: FWIW, I've put in a 4 per day max on short rests, just because I believe you can only get a long rest once every 24 hours in 4E, and it just makes sense to me that you aren't going to rest more than 12 hours a day in a 24 hour day. If long rests have a per day limit, makes sense that short rests should too. Just me though.

 

[BryonD]

Why is that (the bolded) the case? Because some of the defaults of Next certainly fall much more in favor of other editions.

I'm pretty certain I acknowledged that and stated that it applies in reverse just as much.

 

[BryonD]

Actually after at most a half of a long rest, your party fighter will probably be at full HP, without having spent a hit dice. Meaning tomorrow his hit dice will be maxed up, and he'll have them in his back pocket just in case. No worries here. He's so tough, not only does he not have time to bleed, he doesn't even need to bandage himself since his wounds close automatically.

Grittiness is slain. Verisimilitude is gone. This is mechanically like the dwarf's minor action second wind ability from 4th ed, upgraded to be surgeless. When you look at it that way, yeah, wtf were they thinking. They took all this playtest data about hit dice then completely skip it for fighters only.

Meh

If the game demanded this approach, I wouldn't even be asking the question.

I'm certainly looking to be reassured that the default of 100% healing is removable. But, for now, I feel I do have that reassurance. It makes no difference to me if everyone playing in the group down the street is Wolverine in addition to whatever class and race they are playing. If the system seamlessly adapts to my needs then JACKPOT

 

[I'm A Banana]

If the players can chain short rest; healing is a moot point for all classes.

So it's much deeper then? Sure. I wonder why this is part of the design, though. Was chaining short rests not a thing the devs thought the players would do? Was it intentional to create no real incentive to take an 8 hour rest vs. 4 one-hour rests at low levels? What goal does THAT serve, then?

If we're looking for ultimate causes here, it seems clear that the ultimate cause is that where healing that you can recharge with a short rest is more/as effective than healing you can gain with a short rest, there is an incentive to chain short rests to recharge the healing abilities and to spend those, rather than to use the short rest to heal (HD are a more limited resource than short rests). 4e, of course, solved much of this problem with the healing surge mechanic, so that healing HP almost always cost a character a daily resource (I don't recall any surge-free encounter healing offhand, anyway, though I wouldn't be shocked to find a power or two). Which implies that the direct solution would involve having those short-rest-recharged heals costing a Hit Die, essentially re-inventing the Healing Surge.

An alternative might be to change the recharge rate of some of these short-rest-recovered heals to extended-rest-recovered heals, duplicating the daily recharge rate of earlier e's and just allowing multiple classes to do it. I don't know what we'd lose there. I'm not sure we gain a whole lot from letting these happen multiple times during a day.

Ultimately, this isn't as much an issue with HP-as-morale/meat (though that continues to play at the edges) as much as it is an issue with encounter-based healing being quite powerful in comparison to a short rest healing at low levels. If you want to take multiple short rests to be able to more efficiently heal than you could with a single short rest, I'd say that's not an effect I'd really want in my games. But maybe there's other things (aside from "DM Fixes The Game's Problems") that prevent that.

 

[DDNFan]

It sounds way worse on paper then in reality (having been playing 3 NEXT sessions a week for months if not years now) due to the following bits

1) Rules as Written say that Short Rests are 1 or more hours; so they have to "stop" resting, and then "rest again". So there are some hijinks involved in restarting short rests.

2) The amount of time needed to recover up to full goes up exponentially each level, and by the time you hit 5th level or so, you need to "chain" like 5-6 hours worth of rests. If the party can chain that many rests together, they are most likely to be able to just take a long rest altogether and just regain everything anyway.

3) Frankly, even if the party does heal up to full between every fight; it doesn't really trivialize the encounters as much as one would suspect. I'm pretty loose and fast with healing and recovery between fights, and I've had no issues challenging my players with pre-made fights.

4) Any kind of time pressure / monster pressure (random encounters) has the potential to absolutely hose this and cause massive issues for the party (for instance, they burn those resources right before they run into something). If the players don't have those kinds of pressures, they can alternatively just do 5MWD and make this all a moot point. Heck, even just rolling wandering monsters a single time usually keeps players enough on edge to not try it.

5) Because the abilities are so useful to have in a fight, they end up having to spend an extra hour to get it back. So one uses up most of the day resting at that point.

5E is definitely in the "not perfect, but hella fun and worth it" mode for me. As someone whose favorite edition was 4E (I'm perpetual DM, so 3E is terrible for me from a DM'ing standpoint), I am surprised to have found out that 5E has become my new favorite edition by a country mile. I'd encourage folks to try it out throughout the year (especially once the DMG comes out); I think people will be able to find what they like supported fairly well, especially with the DMG if you have your specific playstyle already figured out.



Ahh, my apologies. Not always good with my words.

EDIT: FWIW, I've put in a 4 per day max on short rests, just because I believe you can only get a long rest once every 24 hours in 4E, and it just makes sense to me that you aren't going to rest more than 12 hours a day in a 24 hour day. If long rests have a per day limit, makes sense that short rests should too. Just me though.

1) Rest for 1 hour, do some jumping jacks for 5 minutes. Rest again. One fighter ability shouldn't force the DM to railroad players to not do whatever their characters want to do, including taking a long rest after unloading all spells and doing that each day. If players want to do that, they can and should be able to. It's legal. There should be only story ramifications of taking more time to rest than you probably should.

2) So the game is broken for the first 5 levels, which is around half of the levels that most campaigns attain (which is around ten). The game is half-broken then. Unless you enable 5 minute short rests, then it's completely broken wide open again. As many 4e fans on this thread are saying, they don't want unlimited healing back to full without it costing hit dice. Wizards goofed up here.

3) You should look at this from the point of view of the entire dungeon. If the fighter can absorb all his personal incoming damage for free after 5, 10, 15 minutes of rest, (or one, two, three hours later), then it makes them an unstoppable regenerating tank, ploughing through the dungeon.

4) 5 minute work day is actually much better than this scenario. This is 30 seconds of combat, and a few hours of rest back to 100% full, no hit dice spent or cure wounds from the cleric wasted. Sure, in dungeons you can't always take more than an hour, but plenty of times you can, such as when you're exploring. It's easy to imagine waiting around on guard all day and wave after wave of monsters come and the fighter ends his day at 100% with no hit dice spent. In a 24 hour period, with one long rest at 8 hours, that leaves 16 hours to do short rests, unless you're pressed for time, which taking an extra hour here or there is much less severe than taking a whole day just to get a single long rest. If you had to wait four hours before the next short rest "works", that would be different. But there's no current rule that restricts taking back to back short rests. The 5 minute work day is a fallacy because it's more like 5 minutes, then 16 hours of waiting around when bad things can and probably will happen, before you can refresh your spells. That is not the same as a fighter doing a few battles then the party hides for a few hours. If the DM only ever allows one hour rests, that's really rail-roady and awful, terrible game design.

5) It's sad that the cleric's life ability can only re-fuel up to 50%, but a fighter can heal up to 100%. Both are bad, but the fighter one is totally broken and forces you to play the game like the fighter never wounded, only tired. Not only do some people not want their characters to die in D&D, the designers apparently thought they don't even want them to ever get injured. If you can restore to 100% HP by regaining stamina only, that means 0% of that is actual damage.

They need to fix this. It is broken for the regular game, but even more broken for the 4th edition game. After each 5 minute rest you gain 1d10+level HP. That is comparable or maybe even better than a troll's natural regeneration, I think.

The solution to this isn't to tell DMs not to allow players to take short rests, even if there is no time pressure, it's to fix the actual problem. This is a serious problem, one which doesn't exist when Second Wind restores Temp HP, since after 5 minutes those temps go away. It was much better in the final playtest, and then they apparently listened to feedback and broke the game.

When the DM has to railroad the players into not taking short rests because of one power, that they decided to give the fighter, the game is broken. Yayyyyy.

This needs to be fixed as a Day 0 errata before I'm buying the PHB. I was going to buy the Starter set and DM it for my niece, but I just can't at this point. Even if I ignore the fact that it's unbelievable, it's also broken completely independently of that. I don't want to railroad my players into not taking short rests, and I don't want to be railroaded into not doing so either, or told by Mike Mearls that it's my fault if myself or my players are "cheesy" enough to try and actually take advantage of their powers as written. They had two years of open playtests and they ship the game with this, and tell people that chained short rests break the game and expect people to buy it? Seriously, wth.

 

[Chaltab]

One fighter ability shouldn't force the DM to railroad players to not do whatever their characters want to do, including taking a long rest after unloading all spells and doing that each day. If players want to do that, they can and should be able to. It's legal. There should be only story ramifications of taking more time to rest than you probably should.

One fighter ability shouldn't do that but I'm not sure how it possibly could? IME short rests are just handwaved anyway. They're assumed between significant fights and being unable to take a breather between two combats is the exception. More importantly I'm pretty sure there's a period of time between long rests before you can take another though. Like, you can't wake up, blow all your spells trying to immolate Tiamat, and then get back in bed thirty minutes later. Sleep has diminishing returns past ~7 hours.

2) So the game is broken for the first 5 levels, which is around half of the levels that most campaigns attain (which is around ten). The game is half-broken then. Unless you enable 5 minute short rests, then it's completely broken wide open again. As many 4e fans on this thread are saying, they don't want unlimited healing back to full without it costing hit dice. Wizards goofed up here.

I really don't know what your talking about at all. I mean look at the level 1 fighter from the Starter set, he has 12 freakin HP. That.. that is very few HP. A solid hit from a greatsword and he's done for. If there's no way to recover that, and the party doesn't have a healer, then he's SOL for the remainder of the day. The ability to recover 2-11 HP between fights doesn't break anything, it's essential to keep him on his feet.

3) You should look at this from the point of view of the entire dungeon. If the fighter can absorb all his personal incoming damage for free after 5, 10, 15 minutes of rest, (or one, two, three hours later), then it makes them an unstoppable regenerating tank, ploughing through the dungeon.

Except that he can be stopped quite easily because the total value of his HP is low compared to monster damage. A Greatsword does 1d10+STR Mod damage. An Orc with 20 STR could drop a L1. Fighter with a single solid hit.

4) 5 minute work day is actually much better than this scenario. This is 30 seconds of combat, and a few hours of rest back to 100% full, no hit dice spent or cure wounds from the cleric wasted. Sure, in dungeons you can't always take more than an hour, but plenty of times you can, such as when you're exploring. It's easy to imagine waiting around on guard all day and wave after wave of monsters come and the fighter ends his day at 100% with no hit dice spent. In a 24 hour period, with one long rest at 8 hours, that leaves 16 hours to do short rests, unless you're pressed for time, which taking an extra hour here or there is much less severe than taking a whole day just to get a single long rest. If you had to wait four hours before the next short rest "works", that would be different. But there's no current rule that restricts taking back to back short rests. The 5 minute work day is a fallacy because it's more like 5 minutes, then 16 hours of waiting around when bad things can and probably will happen, before you can refresh your spells. That is not the same as a fighter doing a few battles then the party hides for a few hours. If the DM only ever allows one hour rests, that's really rail-roady and awful, terrible game design.

This isn't bad game design, it's bad pacing on the part of the DM. If the DM has one combat and then sixteen hours of nothing then that's the DM's fault. If the players ignore the pressing danger in favor of taking it easy, then that's the players' fault. Either way, the game is less fun not because the design forced it to be, but because the players seem uninterested in actually playing.

5) When the DM has to railroad the players into not taking short rests because of one power, that they decided to give the fighter, the game is broken.

Okay, one, the default short rests are an HOUR. If the players are sitting around for more than an hour instead of getting out there and stopping the bad guy, then you're failing as a DM. Failing to make them engaged with the game world, or at least failing at choosing people to game with.

Two, as mentioned before, the players have much lower HP in this game. When you only have a few hit points, the ability to recover them all doesn't change things that much because you lose them just as easily.

 

[thunktanker]

Jesus, really? That's not very sound game design, especially when there's an option to make them 5-minute. That's outright bad design, in fact. That's getting into "Actually I shouldn't even buy this..." territory (whereas so far 5E has mostly been "Might not be perfect but should be fun"), because trying to stop the party from ever resting more than once is just going to require ultra-shenanigans.

It has been clear to me that the basic game was always intended to rely on the DM providing rulings on what is permitted and what happens when players decide to do something, rather than having a complex system of rules that cover every kind of shenanigans that the players could get into. Players and DMs that want to focus on rules lawyering can add modules later with more complicated and extensive rules, like the "gritty" campaign module that I'm sure will come out later or be in the DM handbook.

What I take from this thread is that a lot of players are more used to or desire having every situation optimized by rules. But a basic assumption of basic has been that the DM needs to make some judgment calls. And this is an easy DM call. Relax folks! Just be a DM and make the call already. We'll all be just fine.

 

[Grazzt]

No worries here. He's so tough, not only does he not have time to bleed, he doesn't even need to bandage himself since his wounds close automatically.

Bit of a stretch, isn't it? Hit points do not, and have never represented straight up wounds.

As for not having time to bleed....Jesse Ventura in the movie Predator even says he doesn't have time to bleed (while he's bleeding), so maybe there is something to it.