D&D 5E Will there be such a game as D&D Next?

[AbdulAlhazred]

My interpretation of @thecasualoblivion 's point is this: resting for an hour may be cinematic (in some sense of that word), but is not action. Whereas getting your second wind during the course of a fight is not only cinematic (in some sense of that word) but is also action, in the sense of something resolved at the table in the course of play that contributes directly to the particpants' sense of, and emotinal investment in, the ingame situation.

Yeah, that's the way I feel about it. It is DRAMATIC when the paladin is about to go down and then triggers a heal, invokes her Cloak of the Walking Wounded, and all of a sudden drops an AP and goes wild. She leaps up and yells the name of her patron god and starts laying about her with a giant axe! The goblins almost overran her as they poured into the room, but now it is PAYBACK TIME! In DDN either the characters takes a round to drink a potion, or the cleric has to heal her with magic (granted her own healing is a sort of magic too, but the key is she's tapping into her own reserves, not getting juiced up by someone else). 4e also provides enough resources and couples them with healing powers and 2nd Wind in such a way that this sort of thing can play out many times a day, where the DDN cleric will be drained pretty quickly.

 

[TwoSix]

One thing that personally annoys me though is the easiest way to get closer to a 4e like way of working is to just give the PCs a bunch of healing potions. I never really liked the whole concept of potion gulping heroes myself, so I would like to avoid that particular path.

Yea, it's interesting that on a slightly zoomed-out, less granular level that healing surges and potions/wands aren't so different. Both build in a constraint on the overall amount of healing. Healing surges build the limitation into the characters, and potions build it into the play environment. Healing magic is somewhat different than the other two options because it doesn't put the ability into the party's hands, it's limited by the choice of a character type. A party of all clerics will have a much better healing capability than a party of no clerics.

It's going to take a LOT of modules to be able to support everyone's desired aesthetics and gameplay wishes for healing.

Proportional healing or non-proportional healing?
Full healing after battle? I mean, some 4e people have no issues with a wound system, and some old-school people assume that their should be availability of wands and healing magic to heal after every fight.
Scale of recovery time? (Anywhere from minutes to weeks.)
Some sort of wound/death spiral?
In-combat healing or out-of-combat healing only?
Relative weight given to inspirational healing?

I think some of the issues can't be just "optional-rule" modules, they affect the very definition of certain classes and how to create the overall combat mechanics. Plus, these issues matter to people, they affect the overall aesthetic of the entire game. Tricky, tricky.

 

[Bedrockgames]

This would be a far more interesting and productive discussion if your go back and actually read and respond to what I've said as opposed to getting hung up on the word cinematic.

TCO I am happy to, but you said it wasn't cinematic, I challenged that, and you kept disagreeing with me. It seemed like you wanted to wrangle over that issue. I have no problem moving on to your issues with the game.

 

[thecasualoblivion]

TCO I am happy to, but you said it wasn't cinematic, I challenged that, and you kept disagreeing with me. It seemed like you wanted to wrangle over that issue. I have no problem moving on to your issues with the game.

You repeatedly focused on the word cinematic while ignoring the rest of what I said and the context in which I was using the term. You responded to me with mere semantics as opposed to making any substantive contribution.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

HP include luck. There isn't a whole lot of difference between a savage worlds character with a handful of bennies and a D&D character with 20 HP. In fact I think SW is quite a bit more gritty than D&D. I am not saying 4E didn't achieve what you say it did, but that is hardly the only way to approach cinematic.

I imagine the conversation in WotC HQ back when designing 4e went something like...

Dev A: OK, we could just give PCs a whole lot more hit points than they have now, then they'll be able to go through a day of adventuring and do crazy stuff and not worry about dying every minute.
Dev B: But, doesn't there NEED to be some possibility of dying, there should be tension WITHIN an encounter, AND outside each encounter.
Dev A: OK, so what we need is a way to have the PCs pushed to the brink, but then be able to roll with it and pull back from the edge.
Dev B: Sure, we could add in a hero point that lets you negate one attack per encounter.
Dev A: Yeah, but isn't that stuff just part of hit points, why not have a reserve pool of hit points you can tap into to recover?
Dev B: Yeah, that's sort of like the old 'stun points' from (some old supers game or other).
Dev A: Right, but what if we made healing powers be encounter powers and then they just shift hit points from the 'reserve' to the 'active' pool? That lets us decouple the rate of daily healing from the rate of encounter healing.
Dev B: Brilliant, we can call it 'surges'.

The concept IMHO in 4e IS built around hit points being the measure of luck, skill, etc. that allows you to avoid 'meat' damage. There isn't a lot of difference between defensive bennies and hit points, it is easiest to fold that all into hit points, which all editions of D&D have mostly done.

 

[Bedrockgames]

You repeatedly focused on the word cinematic while ignoring the rest of what I said and the context in which I was using the term. You responded to me with mere semantics as opposed to making any substantive contribution.

If you genuinely want to move on to other points I am happy to but this isn't my impression of the conversation we were having.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yea, it's interesting that on a slightly zoomed-out, less granular level that healing surges and potions/wands aren't so different. Both build in a constraint on the overall amount of healing. Healing surges build the limitation into the characters, and potions build it into the play environment. Healing magic is somewhat different than the other two options because it doesn't put the ability into the party's hands, it's limited by the choice of a character type. A party of all clerics will have a much better healing capability than a party of no clerics.

It's going to take a LOT of modules to be able to support everyone's desired aesthetics and gameplay wishes for healing.

Proportional healing or non-proportional healing?
Full healing after battle? I mean, some 4e people have no issues with a wound system, and some old-school people assume that their should be availability of wands and healing magic to heal after every fight.
Scale of recovery time? (Anywhere from minutes to weeks.)
Some sort of wound/death spiral?
In-combat healing or out-of-combat healing only?
Relative weight given to inspirational healing?

I think some of the issues can't be just "optional-rule" modules, they affect the very definition of certain classes and how to create the overall combat mechanics. Plus, these issues matter to people, they affect the overall aesthetic of the entire game. Tricky, tricky.

No kidding!

The thing is, it is a fundamental part of the game too. Once you decide on a role for healing and a preferred mode for it to work in then it impacts all of the other elements of the game. You need to look at all the spells, items, powers, feats, etc that deal with hit points or healing and make sure they are either inappropriate or that their scaling is correct. I think its possible to do that, but clearly supporting a couple of sets of options there would be pretty burdensome in the long run. This is why I fear that ultimately DDN WILL become "one game", it will just drop all pretense of actively supporting anything but a default play style and option set. Any other eventuality honestly seems remote to me. Especially considering its hard to see DDN being some sort of giant instant success that can afford to support 6 different modes of play. WotC is going to earn and pay for every inch they get this time around, lol.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I imagine the conversation in WotC HQ back when designing 4e went something like...

Dev A: OK, we could just give PCs a whole lot more hit points than they have now, then they'll be able to go through a day of adventuring and do crazy stuff and not worry about dying every minute.
Dev B: But, doesn't there NEED to be some possibility of dying, there should be tension WITHIN an encounter, AND outside each encounter.
Dev A: OK, so what we need is a way to have the PCs pushed to the brink, but then be able to roll with it and pull back from the edge.
Dev B: Sure, we could add in a hero point that lets you negate one attack per encounter.
Dev A: Yeah, but isn't that stuff just part of hit points, why not have a reserve pool of hit points you can tap into to recover?
Dev B: Yeah, that's sort of like the old 'stun points' from (some old supers game or other).
Dev A: Right, but what if we made healing powers be encounter powers and then they just shift hit points from the 'reserve' to the 'active' pool? That lets us decouple the rate of daily healing from the rate of encounter healing.
Dev B: Brilliant, we can call it 'surges'.

The concept IMHO in 4e IS built around hit points being the measure of luck, skill, etc. that allows you to avoid 'meat' damage. There isn't a lot of difference between defensive bennies and hit points, it is easiest to fold that all into hit points, which all editions of D&D have mostly done.

I can't know their thoughts but my impression is HS were a way to introduce mundane healing to the game to around the perceived problem of the bag of healing potions.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I can't know their thoughts but my impression is HS were a way to introduce mundane healing to the game to around the perceived problem of the bag of healing potions.

Right. I'm just saying that some sort of other mechanic like a 'hero point' could have been employed to avoid having PCs 'go over the edge' when pushed hard. I don't know if that was considered or what chain of logic actually led to HS as the final design, but the point being they decided to keep luck etc in terms of durability embodied in hit points and not spread it out into other things (at least any more than D&D ever has).

 

[Bedrockgames]

Right. I'm just saying that some sort of other mechanic like a 'hero point' could have been employed to avoid having PCs 'go over the edge' when pushed hard. I don't know if that was considered or what chain of logic actually led to HS as the final design, but the point being they decided to keep luck etc in terms of durability embodied in hit points and not spread it out into other things (at least any more than D&D ever has).

I agree. I think it is probably because hero points and HP already a lot of space. The amount of HP you get in D&D is basically like having hero points that are locked in place (from a purely mechanical point if view). Where D&D differs from a more cinematic game is virtually everyone else has varying degrees of hero points in that form as well. If it were pure cinematic. It would probably reserve HP over 8-12 for major villains and npcs.