D&D 4E Throwing ideas, seeing what sticks (and what stinks)

[AbdulAlhazred]

If you look at the math of 5e's treasure allocation, it basically hands out 1 permanent magic item per 4 levels and 1 consumable every level.

It isn't necessary to hand out a permanent magic item every level - that leads to bloat by requiring a ridiculously large number of good magic items to create differentiation. If you can only have 3 items that work(ala 5e), everyone's a little bit more different than they are in 4e.

Sure, my scheme just says "well, an item, a 'feat', etc are all just 'progress'". So you could have no items at all, or one ever per PC, or one per level. Beyond that I envisage that there can be some variable amount of 'minor boons' that don't produce a level up. Those would just be story-based things that the DM can give out or players can acquire just as there have always been. Obviously the rate of reward of these things might have SOME impact on game balance, but basically my response is that nothing is perfect, and in any case the DM can always just say "yeah, FOR YOU that's a major boon, it might be trivial for the wizard, but for the barbarian the Badge of the Berserker is serious stuff!" You could simply decide that if a character was 'sandbagging' and picking up lots of minor boons while avoiding level ups that they just level up regardless. Because it's really a pretty loose criteria its easy to bend. The main goal is to keep characters of similar power being binned together in the same level, or at least close. This is really after all what level is meant to do, measure the actual power of the PCs, just like for monsters. By flipping the logic of "level up to get more powerful" on its head to "get more powerful and you level up" MANY issues suddenly go away.

Obviously progress could still drive a superabundance of items, if the game designer(s) and/or GM simply neglect other alternative boons, but my feeling is that there would be a natural tendency for things to drive forward. Nor does it seem like it will be terribly difficult for the GM to come up with reasons to grant boons for narrative reasons. "Yeah, you sink your sword into the heart of the Red Dragon, his blood covers you, and you taste its metallic tang on your tongue, power seems to surge through your body!" etc etc etc. All stuff you CAN do in 4e now, but the game is just presented in a way that is somewhat fixated on items and has this somewhat artificial distinction between things you acquire by narrative and things you acquire by mechanics.

 

[Myrhdraak]

I got an idea the other day which I would like to get some feedback on. How would the 4th Edition game work if the HP pool was split into a physical damage pool and one life/psychic pool (radiant, necrotic and psychic damage). Maybe with a split of 3/4 vs. 1/4 or 2/3 vs. 1/3. Battles would go faster and potentially be mere deadly. Negative HP in the life/psychic pool might not result in death but rather a dazed condition? Would it fly? Would it be greatly unbalanced? Could it be improved further? Any ideas or suggestions

/Myrhdraak

 

[Tony Vargas]

I got an idea the other day which I would like to get some feedback on. How would the 4th Edition game work if the HP pool was split into a physical damage pool and one life/psychic pool (radiant, necrotic and psychic damage).

A number of systems have done something like that, and it can be treacherous, if there's any way to bypass the larger pool, for instance...

Maybe with a split of 3/4 vs. 1/4 or 2/3 vs. 1/3. Battles would go faster and potentially be mere deadly.

How so?

Negative HP in the life/psychic pool might not result in death but rather a dazed condition?

Dazed seems pretty minor.

Would it fly? Would it be greatly unbalanced? Could it be improved further? Any ideas or suggestions

No. Yes. Almost certainly.

You have to work out why the difference in the pools matters. So far you've got one difference, with dazed instead of dropped for one pool being reduced to 0. You haven't gone into what causes damage to go to one pool rather than another.

To be workable without introducing imbalance, death-spirals, and other nasty issues, you'd probably want damage to all come off one pool (the non-physical) before being inflicted on the physical one. Then, for purposes of greater 'realism' or 'grittiness,' you could have the latter be harder to heal (non-surge healing only, perhaps? Or rest & time only?).

In Hero System, there's a two-pool (Stun & Body) system that works fairly well. Stun keeps you conscious, Body keeps you alive. So you can be dying (negative Body), but still fighting (positive Stun), which is kinda neat, when you think about it, as it's something that happens in genre.

 

[Myrhdraak]

Well I have been tinkering with 4th Edition, introduced a lot of things from 5th Edition into the game (bounded accuracy for example). But in order to shorten the battles I have also reduced the HP to the 4th edition starting hp but then only add 75% of what you normally gets as you progress up in level (both for characters and monsters). It has worked very well, but then I started to consider that maybe rather than reducing the HP gained per level (which leads to some strange round of figures for some classes), I could potentially hand out the full 4th Edition HP but divide it into 2 pools instead. The physical pool can never be higher than 75% of the maximum HP and never lower than 50% for example. A Mindflayer might have 50/50 and Orc have 75/25. Players could either chose themselves, or have it guided by class and abilities. Running out of Physical HP would be handled as normal in the game. The "psyche/Life-force/mental" pool is only reduced when hit by psychic, radiant or necrotic damage. What I am afraid of is the characters will then only focus on gettings Powers that do psychic, radiant or necrotic damage, as the monsters have less of those resources by deafult. This could be compensated by rather than dying or going unconscious you add some deliberating effect that can balance this. Question is what or how? Dazed could be one option, unconsious (without dying) another but then with some mechanism to recover.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Randomish thought: It makes little sense for a medium (or small!) mortal humanoid to have tons of 'physical' damage capacity, and quite a bit of sense for a heroic one to have tons of will-to-live/pcyche/morale/etc non-physical capacity. Since the game is about small-medium heroes, it might make sense to leverage that as another difference between PCs and monsters. PCs tend to be heavy on the non-physical side of the equation, just as, in standard 4e, they tend to have fewer hps but tons of healing.

 

[Raith5]

Surely necrotic should be physical damage?

I like the idea of the mental -physical divide but in practice I am not sure it adds much - but I guess I would have to see it in action to be sure.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Surely necrotic should be physical damage?

I like the idea of the mental -physical divide but in practice I am not sure it adds much - but I guess I would have to see it in action to be sure.

Yeah, it seems somewhat arbitrary to me. I mean, you can probably easily enough imagine some damage types as being 'non-lethal', things that confuse, effect morale, etc, but its not at all clear that the actual powers use damage types all that consistently, or that all damage is so clearly categorizable. Also its easy to find examples in literature where the same effect can be either type depending on the situation (and dramatic requirements of the author). Also, why would there be only TWO? I mean its perfectly feasible to imagine multiple kinds of damage that each has its own pool (mental, physical, spiritual, luck, etc). I think its safe to say that hit points are an abstraction designed to allow you to not worry about such things.

 

[pemerton]

Marvel Heroic uses three discrete "damage" tracks: physical stress/trauma, mental stress/trauma and emotional stress/trauma.

Page 25 of the rulebook sets it out this way:

Physical stress is bodily injury, exhaustion, the effects of toxins or chemicals, and so forth. Being stressed out from physical stress means blacking out or becoming unconscious, or perhaps incapable of activity from pain or fatigue. Physical trauma includes serious wounds, broken limbs, system-wide infection, and worse.

Mental stress is confusion, lack of concentration, mental fatigue, and the results of telepathic assault. Being stressed out from mental stress usually leaves someone insensate, incoherent, or unconscious. Mental trauma includes memory lapses, identity crisis, or impaired reasoning.

Emotional stress is despair, fear, anger, or any number of negative emotional states. Being stressed out from too much emotional stress means being paralyzed with fear, lost in one’s misery, or consumed with irrational anger. Emotional trauma includes severe phobias, crippling depression, or persistent rage.​

Page 24 also tells us that when you get too much trauma "your hero is dead, in a vegetative state, or otherwise out of the story."

In my experience of running MHRP, it is sometimes not clear whether stress should be mental or emotional. Drawing these distinctions is always going to be a bit arbitrary.

(A very different game: in Burning Wheel elves have a Grief stat, and when, due to the experience of suffering, betrayal, etc, it reaches 10 - the maximum for any stat in BW - the character is out of the game, either travelling to the West or wasting away, or even hurling him-/herself into a chasm (like Maedhros in the Silmarillion).)

 

[MoutonRustique]

Off the top of my head:

You could sort of add-in a status at the loss of enough X type damage (or from X pool in this case). For instance, when you loose all your Psychic/Moral pool, you're [stunned] for a round - if you couple this with monster design, you can get some pretty cool results. A sort of "Vulnerable [?]" with a bit more involved than simply tagging the creature. (Create a red dragon with a "cold pool" that weakens his breath weapon attack or something.)

This isn't really what you were going for, but it popped when I read what you proposed.

One thing you could do that works with (very little rule change requirements) would be to co-opt the THP / HP divide : you could turn 3/4 of regular hp into THP. You could also have all non-ritual healing affect only THP (for that gritty meat-point feel).

This does conflict with some THP "shield bubble" situations... On the other hand, while the THP non-stacking rule was very important in 3e, (IME) the way it works out in 4e makes it so stacking THP isn't really a thing that can get out of hand unless your group really builds for it...

 

[Tony Vargas]

You could sort of add-in a status at the loss of enough X type damage (or from X pool in this case). For instance, when you loose all your Psychic/Moral pool, you're [stunned] for a round - if you couple this with monster design, you can get some pretty cool results. A sort of "Vulnerable [?]" with a bit more involved than simply tagging the creature. (Create a red dragon with a "cold pool" that weakens his breath weapon attack or something.)

There are already examples of simpler things of that nature in 4e. The monster that loses a trait on rounds when it takes radiant damage, troll regeneration vs fire, etc...

You could get greater detail by having damage thresholds as well as damage types mattering, at the 'cost' (it's the point, really, I suppose) of added complexity & bookkeeping. Some general thing based on a fraction of regular hps might not work so well, since monsters can tend to have huge hp pools.

This isn't really what you were going for, but it popped when I read what you proposed.

It's an interesting idea.