With 5e here, what will 4e be remembered for?

[Remathilis]

All threads go to pot whenever hp or alignment is brought into it.

 

[Minigiant]

Can we go back to talking about all those cool boss fights and teamwork combos and complex noncombat montages.

There they were. Like a dozen orc grunts, some priests and the chief. We failed the skill challenge to avoid a fight. So I said something foul about the chief's mama involving apple saice, a bed, and a bag then roll initiative. The rogue garroted one of the casters. The wizard corralled the grunts with a ball of fire while I shouted for a charge. All on one of the one eyed priests, killing him...

 

[fjw70]

4e was flexible enough to handle meat points. Just look at healing surges as the meat points and only allow a few surges to be recovered with a week's rest.


There are a lot of things WotC could have done to make 4e more flexible and accommodating to multiple play styles but they did. Oh well.

 

[cavalier973]

In my opinion, hit point damage represents a mix of physical wounds and psychological damage (lowered morale, etc.). When the character gets hit, he doesn't just suffer physical pain, but he also suffers some morale loss. The warlord doesn't "shout his wounds closed", but he does get the character to over come the morale loss of seeing his own blood dripping out of his chest.

In 4e, there is the "Bloodied" condition, which implies (or, at least, I infer) that the first half of a character's hit points are all morale. When the character has lost half his hit points, at that point he is no longer able to prevent being physically harmed. Some monsters can bloody a character with one blow (and vice versa); they can cause physical damage in the first blow. Some times, though, it takes a while to wear the opponent down enough to draw blood. Again, that's what I infer from reading the rules.

 

[wingsandsword]

Anybody who wishes to deny that 4e was a divisive edition that spawned lots of vehement arguments about it’s legitimacy and purpose, merely needs to take the microcosm of this very thread as evidence. We’ve had five years of this - thank goodness it’s coming to an end!

More like 6+ years, but yes, 4e was vastly divisive, and practically schismatic in what it did to the player base. Yes, this entire thread can be seen as a microcosm of it. I started posting to ENWorld less and less as those edition wars got hotter and hotter and it became increasingly clear that they would go on forever with no resolve, like an internet version of the Blood War.

I realized the divisions went way beyond internet message boards when I was on active duty in the Army. Find other gamers on post, and if you said you played D&D, there was always this awkward "whose side are you on" moment where they asked if you played 4e or 3.5. Most players I met played 3.5, but the ones I met who played 4e would always refuse to play 3.5 and would trash talk it.

I won't switch from 3.5 to 5e, I like 3.5 too much, but I like 5e a lot more and I just might buy some 5e books to at least be conversant in this edition. I'm seriously considering the core books, and if they do a "Manual of the Planes 5e" with the great wheel restored and discussing its role in the various D&D settings (like a Great Wheel Eberron) I'm inclined strongly to look at it.

5e, to me, is at least an edition that I can work with. It's not going to displace my favorite, but it's at least one that doesn't feel like it's actively chasing me away from D&D the way 4e did.

 

[Ichneumon]

Hit points are fractally illogical, but they work.

 

[pemerton]

I don't like non-magical healing because I can't describe wounds (something that DM's are encouraged to do) and then retroactively undescribe them without my suspension of disbelief suffering.

As I think you realise, one possible solution is to not describe wounds. But I don't think it's the only solution, which is good for you because you want to narrate wouds. I'll explain shortly.

DMs narrative: "The orc cuts you across the chest with his black blade. At the sight of your blood, the horde howls with excitement."
Warlord's mechanic: "Buck up camper!" (hit points return to max)
DM's narrative: "Uh..you feel better, turns out it was just a scratch...again."

who says you can't be heroic while gravely wounded? Ignoring a serious injury while pushing yourself to your limits is heroic. Hit points are an abstraction, I know that. But that's a good thing, I can describe it any way I want. Saying that I can't describe a massive loss of hit points as a wound is just as silly as saying that hit points always represent blood spilled.

The DM's error, in your example, is in his/her second statement.

Given that you like a game in which some hit point loss reflects wouding, and in which heroic characters can push on despite their wounds, why retcon the wound into a scratch? Why not narrate the warlord's healing along the following lines?:

"Spurred on by your valiant comrade, you ignore the pain and the blood and hurl yourself back into the fray!"

No retconning required. That's roughly how we handle it in my game. (I should add - I think we're on the same page that we're talking here about cuts and bruises, not evisceration or maiming.)

(For a technical analysis: the hit point loss due to the orc's attack indicates a wound; but the hit points themselves aren't a wound tracker. They're a resilience/monentum tracker. When the warlord restores momentum with an inspiring wound, the hit points go back up, but that doesn't change the fact that a wound was suffered and is still there.)

There is a few things. One is just pacing. In some ways an RPG is more like a story then a board game or a sporting event. In any movie or book, there are big moments and smaller ones, and one of the jobs of the smaller ones is to make the bigger ones more exciting.

<snip>

In terms of mechanics, no, I don't want to say for 3 orcs we use one system, and for 8 another.

Thanks for the reply. The pacing bit I get, but not the mechanics bit. People use a variety of mecanics for social resolution (skill roll, skill challenge, free form = say yes/no, etc). Gygax in his DMG endorses multiple mechanics for finding secret doors (roll 1d6, describe twidding of knobs and manipulation of sconces, etc). But D&D has never really embraced multiple mechanic for resolving combat. I don't see why not - it solves so many problems! (4e comes close - minions and solos can be seen as variant combat resolution mechanics, but they are disguised as monster builds.)

 

[pemerton]

I started posting to ENWorld less and less as those edition wars got hotter and hotter and it became increasingly clear that they would go on forever with no resolve, like an internet version of the Blood War.

<snip>

5e, to me, is at least an edition that I can work with. It's not going to displace my favorite, but it's at least one that doesn't feel like it's actively chasing me away from D&D the way 4e did.

Anybody who wishes to deny that 4e was a divisive edition that spawned lots of vehement arguments about it’s legitimacy and purpose, merely needs to take the microcosm of this very thread as evidence. We’ve had five years of this - thank goodness it’s coming to an end!

All published RPGs are divisive, in the trivial sense that they divide the total population of RPGers into two groups - those who play the game in question, and those who don't. The oddity for me is why, given all the RPGs in the world that people don't play, so many non-4e players felt (and still seem to feel) compelled to explain not only that they don't play, but why they don't play, and why those who do play are making some sort of suboptimal aesthetic judgement (eg sacrificing "simulation" for "gamism").

Here's another way to look at it: for the edition wars to stop, either one side has to stop posting their attacks upon 4e, or the other side has to stop playing 4e and posting about it. It seems to me that only one of those states of affairs is a reasonable one to expect. (And I don't see any parallel, however metaphorical, to the Blood War. Me playing a game I enjoy, and posting about it, is not an attack upon anyone else.)

My evidence is that during 3e everyone was playing D&D.

I don't understand this evidence. I wasn't playing 3E, and I'm someone. I just didn't bomb every RPG forum on the internet with the reasons why I don't care for 3E.

 

[Pentegarn]

What will 4e be remembered for? Only time will tell what the majority of individuals remember it for. But for now, it can't be answered except by the individual.

For me and the groups I play with, we already refer to 4e as WoW: The Gathering. That pretty much sums it up for us.

 

[TrippyHippy]

All published RPGs are divisive, in the trivial sense that they divide the total population of RPGers into two groups - those who play the game in question, and those who don't. The oddity for me is why, given all the RPGs in the world that people don't play, so many non-4e players felt (and still seem to feel) compelled to explain not only that they don't play, but why they don't play, and why those who do play are making some sort of suboptimal aesthetic judgement (eg sacrificing "simulation" for "gamism").

Here's another way to look at it: for the edition wars to stop, either one side has to stop posting their attacks upon 4e, or the other side has to stop playing 4e and posting about it. It seems to me that only one of those states of affairs is a reasonable one to expect. (And I don't see any parallel, however metaphorical, to the Blood War. Me playing a game I enjoy, and posting about it, is not an attack upon anyone else.)

I don't understand this evidence. I wasn't playing 3E, and I'm someone. I just didn't bomb every RPG forum on the internet with the reasons why I don't care for 3E.

I could quite easily post a raft of criticism about 3E too - but it wouldn’t create a whole massive thread of people defending it as if I’d insulted them personally, and who doggedly argue even about whether the game was divisive or not! Nobody here is posting ‘attacks’ - it’s simply criticism of a game. That’s all.

Moreover the edition wars have been resolved. 5E resolved it. All debates now are merely echoes of the past.