[UA] Mearls will be happy about this

[mmadsen]

I don't like this rule. If the reserve hit points are to be a safety valve, then why not consider the lower half of your normal hit points your "safety valve"? If the objective is quick healing, well, that at least makes sense. But I don't think quick healing is needed. Don't have a cleric? That's unfortunate, and it makes you think hard about the next level you take, or what cohort to pick up, etc. Hard choices make good games.

To quote from the original article:

Reserve points work particularly well in low-magic campaigns or any game in which healing is rare, expensive, or otherwise hard to get.

The reserve-point rules were written for Omega World, a post-apocalyptic mini-game published in Polyhedron. Not all game worlds involve the plentiful healing of D&D's implied setting.

 

[Saeviomagy]

I don't like this rule. If the reserve hit points are to be a safety valve, then why not consider the lower half of your normal hit points your "safety valve"? If the objective is quick healing, well, that at least makes sense. But I don't think quick healing is needed. Don't have a cleric? That's unfortunate, and it makes you think hard about the next level you take, or what cohort to pick up, etc. Hard choices make good games.

Except it's not a hard choice - it's no choice at all. Unless the GM makes a lot of effort to leave you alone to heal, you are dead without a cleric or other healing spell caster.

You can get away without other classes or spells, but you absolutely MUST have cure spells.

This variant rule provides a way for DM's to avoid that.

 

[Ycore Rixle]

To quote from the original article:

The reserve-point rules were written for Omega World, a post-apocalyptic mini-game published in Polyhedron. Not all game worlds involve the plentiful healing of D&D's implied setting.

To quote from the original post:

I don't know what my cleric is going to do with himself.

I thought we were discussing UA/D&D/clerics stuff here. True, there are D&D games where healing is difficult to come by - but I think this is a poor way to make up for the lack of healing in those games.

Call it aesthetics, call me Mr. Kelvin, but I like zero to mean zero. Not "the start of your reserves if you can get a chance to rest for a minute."

More elegant, I think, for players and DMs to pace themselves through a dungeon, feeling the rising tension as the PCs' hit points dwindle. This requires making the climactic counter suitable for a damaged party, but then that's what a DM does, match the challenge to the party.

 

[Ycore Rixle]

You can get away without other classes or spells, but you absolutely MUST have cure spells.

This variant rule provides a way for DM's to avoid that.

I can think of another way for DM's (and players) to avoid that. Don't fight such hard monsters.

I would much rather revamp the XP/EL/CR scale to account for low-healing parties facing less threatening monsters than I would like to implement a wonky double-your-hit-points system.

 

[Saeviomagy]

I can think of another way for DM's (and players) to avoid that. Don't fight such hard monsters.

I would much rather revamp the XP/EL/CR scale to account for low-healing parties facing less threatening monsters than I would like to implement a wonky double-your-hit-points system.

Yay. Boring fights with no element of risk. No way to use any of the paper tiger monsters and actually have them DO anything.

The key thing with this system is that individual fights do not get easier. It's just that the party can do twice as many without having to stop to recover.

 

[Endur]

My inclination is to keep the rules regarding hit points the same, whether we are in a magic or non-magic medieval setting. In a non-magic system, you are just a lot more careful in combat. You know every sword blow could end your career.

That being said, I never thought there was anything "special" about death being at -10 hit points, and the reserve system might make more sense.

 

[Tarrasque Wrangler]

I am not going to sit there and count off minutes since the last fight so everybody can get hit points back for no visible reason. I would much rather:

A: Increase hit dice size, ie how Arcana Unearthed uses D6 as the baseline.

B: See more ways to do low-power cleric-type healing with Alchemy or a Heal check. Where are the folk remedies, or the old wise woman of the village who doesn't have real magic, just a knack with herbs?

C: Some kind of "drama point" mechanic whereby low-level characters can dodge deaths from those random crits kobolds deal out. Maybe once per session, you can convert a crit on yourself into a normal hit, or an attack that would take you to less than 0 hp instead takes you to 1 and knocks you out for the rest of the battle. That's just off the top of my head, and should in no way be construed as a well-thought out idea.

 

[hong]

More elegant, I think, for players and DMs to pace themselves through a dungeon, feeling the rising tension as the PCs' hit points dwindle. This requires making the climactic counter suitable for a damaged party, but then that's what a DM does, match the challenge to the party.

At high levels (say > 15th), hit points are not something you worry about, in terms of resource management between fights. You can go from full hit points to near zero in just a couple of rounds of fighting. Assuming you survive, the cleric does a heal or mass heal, and you're back close to full again. The resources you worry about at those levels tend to be heal spells, boom spells, limited use/day items and abilities, and so forth. Smart PCs will get an item to cast heal on themselves, to protect against the possibility that the cleric is the one who gets taken out.

Heck, this sort of thing can even happen at mid-levels (around 10th-15th). The mage IMC got steamrolled by a giant blob monster and went from full hit points to -40 in one round. A few sessions ago, the knight got jumped by a big cat-demon and went from near-full to near-zero in the first round of combat. Only two critical hits from the raging barbarian that killed the demon saved him from getting shredded.

I'm seriously contemplating a change to our house rules to extend the bleed-out time for PCs who go down. Danger is all well and good, but the experience of one death per session that was typical of our high-level campaign is not something I want to repeat.

 

[hong]

You can get away without other classes or spells, but you absolutely MUST have cure spells.

Not just cure spells, but also restoration, remove disease, neutralize poison, heroes' feast....

 

[mearls]

Mike Mearls once said he was amazed that no one had swiped Tweet's mucho excellent hp reserve rules from the Omega World d20 mini-game. Well, WotC apparently was smart enough to include them in the upcoming Unearthed Arcana.

Way to go WotC! This is fantastic news. It's good to see that quality OGC (well, the reserve rule is actually closed since it was published in Poly) is making it's way into WotC's books. Jon Tweet is the best RPG designed ever, bar none, no one else comes close for mechanics. The reserve rule is the quintessential example of seemingly small changes to d20 that allow it to handle different types of games elegantly and easily. I really hope that it finds its way into the next edition of Star Wars, if such a beast should come to pass.

EDIT: One of the reasons I love the reserve rule is that it gives you tons of design space. In other words, you can tinker with it to produce lots of effects. For instance, you could make a game where the PCs have very low hit points, but lots of reserves. That gives the players an interesting middle ground of lethality. Any one major strike can kill them, but lots of minor encounters don't give 'em much trouble. My gut instinct is that it would work swimmingly well with CoC. The PCs can beat up mundane cultists or zombies all day, but a dimensional shambler (never mind the really nasty monsters) eats them for lunch.