D&D 5E Those who come from earlier editions, why are you okay with 5E healing (or are you)?

[Charlaquin]

Just envisioning how every D&D novel would read if combat in the novels was handled how some people here advocate handling combat in the game. None of the heroes ever actually gets wounded or takes damage their whole career. Drizzt just only ever gets winded, no matter if the battle was against giants or wraith Zaknafein. And people think he was a Mary Sue now. Just imagine lol

1. Novels are a different medium with different needs than games. What works for one will not necessarily work for the other.
2. It keeps being said and it keeps being ignored. HP loss is neither the only nor the best way to mechanically represent serious physical injury. Drizt getting beat up and having to spend weeks or months recovering would be better reflected by the accumulation of lingering injuries, exhaustion levels, and/or effects that prevent the recovery of hit points, all of which take more than a simple long rest to recover from.
3. Isn’t Drizt a ranger? Why doesn’t he just Cure Wounds himself when he gets hurt? Serious question, I haven’t read the books.

 

[Oofta]

1. Novels are a different medium with different needs than games. What works for one will not necessarily work for the other.
2. It keeps being said and it keeps being ignored. HP loss is neither the only nor the best way to mechanically represent serious physical injury. Drizt getting beat up and having to spend weeks or months recovering would be better reflected by the accumulation of lingering injuries, exhaustion levels, and/or effects that prevent the recovery of hit points, all of which take more than a simple long rest to recover from.
3. Isn’t Drizt a ranger? Why doesn’t he just Cure Wounds himself when he gets hurt? Serious question, I haven’t read the books.

Drizzt doesn't really follow the rules for PCs, he's just a melee munchkin. If I were to write him up I'd make him a dex based fighter of some sort. But yes, magical healing does come into play in various books, just not from Drizzt that I remember.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

Just envisioning how every D&D novel would read if combat in the novels was handled how some people here advocate handling combat in the game. None of the heroes ever actually gets wounded or takes damage their whole career. Drizzt just only ever gets winded, no matter if the battle was against giants or wraith Zaknafein. And people think he was a Mary Sue now. Just imagine lol

The Drizzt novels are quite a good example of non-meat hitpoints. Drizzt and his current nemesis du jour will fight for ages, taking hitpoints off each other, but these are generally narrated as last-minute parries or a loss of position or balance that puts the receiver closer to losing the fight rather than multiple stab wounds to the face.
Of course he also fights lots of mooks that do go down in one or two hits, or large creatures that do absorb a lot of physical punishment.

 

[Sacrosanct]

The Drizzt novels are quite a good example of non-meat hitpoints. Drizzt and his current nemesis du jour will fight for ages, taking hitpoints off each other, but these are generally narrated as last-minute parries or a loss of position or balance that puts the receiver closer to losing the fight rather than multiple stab wounds to the face.
Of course he also fights lots of mooks that do go down in one or two hits, or large creatures that do absorb a lot of physical punishment.

Not in the early books, which I keep mentioning. I don’t know about the later stuff, and maybe it’s true, but in the first six novels (1990 and prior), especially in his trilogy, he suffers many wounds. They are narrated as wounds. And they are narrated as needing time to heal if magic wasn’t used. And everyone he fights is narrated with wounds. Swords slipping in to get a cut here, a kick to the face there, etc. it is simply undeniable to look at how D&D is narrated, either via live stream sessions, or novel representations, and see that combat is narrated with successful attacks being actual wounds on the target

Also, Drizzt wasn’t a ranger chronologically until the end of the prequel trilogy. He was a straight fighter. No healing magic.

Either way, my point being, was that if the books were narrated like some are saying D&D combat sessions should be narrated, combat would be boring. No real sense of risk to the characters if they literally are never hit. Ever. And it doesn’t fit the feel of the game either, to never ever have PCs suffer any wounds in their entire careers as long as they have 1 hp

 

[Lanefan]

It's a game for having fun, not merely a workflow for simulating fiction.

And it works best when these two things seamlessly integrate - when the fiction simulated through the workflow either is the fun, leads directly to the fun, or augments the fun already present.

 

[Lanefan]

I hate to break it to you, but even if you take every game rule as representing the setting... you've got an inconsistent mess.

The big one for me recently is slot levels in magic. They make no coherent sense. They are entirely a fabrication of the game.

But, they make the game easier to play, and it is far more trouble to fix than it is to just leave alone and ignore. (Spell points don't neccesarily help, just move the problem around)

The concept of only being able to do so much magic within a given time is sound, if only because were magic to be unlimited in a setting that setting would quickly become unrecognizable from anything we can relate to - for the short time it existed before self-destructing, that is.

So, the question becomes how to quantify those limitations; and while neither slots nor spell points (I've used both) is a perfect answer by any means, they'll have to do until a better method comes along.

The other option, of course, would be to do away with spellcasting classes entirely; but somehow I don't think that idea's gonna fly very far.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Isn’t Drizt a ranger? Why doesn’t he just Cure Wounds himself when he gets hurt? Serious question, I haven’t read the books.

Drizzt doesn't really follow the rules for PCs, he's just a melee munchkin.

So he's a spell-less ranger?
How depressing.

were magic to be unlimited in a setting that setting would quickly become unrecognizable

5e cantrips and rituals are unlimitted-use.

So, the question becomes how to quantify those limitations; and while neither slots nor spell points (I've used both) is a perfect answer by any means, they'll have to do until a better method comes along.

Slots are, by D&D's cthonian standards, the something better that has replaced preparation, which replaced the quixotic Vancian conciet of memorization.

The other option, of course, would be to do away with spellcasting classes entirely; but somehow I don't think that idea's gonna fly very far.

The other other option is to do away with non-spell-casting classes. Like, in 5e, well... er...
...that is non-spell-casting sub-classes. The game would hardly miss the 'serker, champ, BM, thief & assassin.

One of the big things about D&D is to emulate stories. They are the inspiration behind D&D. The whole reason appendix N exists.

It can't be that big a thing, or it'd be doing a better job of it, 45 years in.

Maybe they really are just inspiration, and D&D, as so often claimed in it's defense, has forged it's own self-refrent sub-genre, by perfectly emulating itself?

But, really, for as badly as D&D spell-casting or magic-items or armor-dependence or excessive combat focus or stereotyping or whatever the critics harp on at a given moment, may be as a genre emulator, hit points* actually do a pretty fair job of modeling the implausible survival ('plot armor'), resilience, and come-from-behind victories you see in fiction.






* and saving throws, prior to 3e.

 

[cbwjm]

On the subject of Drizzt I think 3e did the best writeup of him. He was mostly fighter levels with a few ranger levels and, I think, 1 level of barbarian. I wasn't sure where the barbarian level came from but otherwise I like how they took note that he started out as a fighter first, becoming quite skilled, before becoming a ranger.

 

[Charlaquin]

Not in the early books, which I keep mentioning. I don’t know about the later stuff, and maybe it’s true, but in the first six novels (1990 and prior), especially in his trilogy, he suffers many wounds. They are narrated as wounds. And they are narrated as needing time to heal if magic wasn’t used. And everyone he fights is narrated with wounds. Swords slipping in to get a cut here, a kick to the face there, etc. it is simply undeniable to look at how D&D is narrated, either via live stream sessions, or novel representations, and see that combat is narrated with successful attacks being actual wounds on the target

And still you refuse to acknowledge that those wounds, in an actual D&D game, could have been reflected by something more severe and difficult to reverse than HP loss.

Either way, my point being, was that if the books were narrated like some are saying D&D combat sessions should be narrated, combat would be boring. No real sense of risk to the characters if they literally are never hit. Ever.

Characters are hit the way “some” are saying they should be narrated. When a character reaches half HP, they are visibly harmed - cuts, bruises, ragged breathing, etc. When they drop to 0 hit points, they are meaningfully injured. That’s a good time to bring the optional lingering injuries rules into play, if you are so inclined.

And it doesn’t fit the feel of the game either, to never ever have PCs suffer any wounds in their entire careers as long as they have 1 hp

What character have you EVER seen go through their entire career without ever going below 1 hp?

 

[Sacrosanct]

And still you refuse to acknowledge that those wounds, in an actual D&D game, could have been reflected by something more severe and difficult to reverse than HP loss.

You have a funny definition of refuse. I’ve said many times how I have no problem with people interpreting however they want. That’s the opposite of refusing to acknowledge. What my beef is, is when someone says they view hp like meat, and don’t like the super fast healing to Max after 8 hours, and people like you telling them they are wrong. There is one paragraph saying HP is abstract. Literally every other reference, in the books, in the live streams, and in the novels, narrate or describe actual wounds. So it’s entirely reasonable for people to make the accosiation that HP loss in combat means actual wounds. If there’s anyone refusing to acknowledge things, it’s you, with those.

What character have you EVER seen go through their entire career without ever going below 1 hp?

Most of the surviving ones. Because most of the ones who did go below 1hp, they died. You’re arguing that as long as a PC never went below 1hp, they didn’t ever receive a physical wound. Ever. Because every hp loss from any source will be healed to max after 8 hours, and no wound does that. Heck, many types of fatigue don’t heal that fast. And frankly, the idea that adventurers never receive wounds in combat over their career unless they also go unconscious (which is what happens below 1hp) is laughable.