Seems like Mike Mearls' latest column has set off another wave of discussion about hit points and stuff. I won't link back to the original article because I've stopped reading Wizards.com, as everything I saw there either bored or annoyed me. Anydangway, I just wanted to say a few things about hit points and such that aren't directly related to anything I've read recently. I just want to give Mearls credit for kicking off another round of this evergreen nonsense.
1) If you are a player (not a DM) then you should always, always argue that hit points are abstract combinations of luck, toughness, agility and whatever else you can throw in the mix. Keeping hitpoints undefined allows you to work over the GM for extra healing. "The friendly leprechaun can heal me by granting me the luck o' the Irish, right?" That sort of thing.
2) Abstract "healing surges" are about the most boring game mechanic ever. I've used healing surges in my own campaigns for a while now, only they're called the "Liquid Courage" house rule. I first saw this thing at Grognardia, though Jamie Mal attributes the idea to Sham. The basic idea is that once per session you can down the contents of a wineskin to gain d6 hit points. It doesn't scale up, and that's on purpose. Also, PC's getting soaked in the dungeon is a lot more amusing than "I use my healing surge".
3) If clerics are nothing but wandering medkits then the problem is in the campaign, not the friggin' combat rules. Give your players some kickass gods to worship, ecclesiastical authorities to cheese off, holy shrines to visit, etc. Also, here's a simple house rule I've used for both MUs and clerics: No double dipping; you cannot memorize two of any spell. Though I don't think this rule is absolutely necessary, as superior players will make use of all spells available, not just fireball and cure light wounds.
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I'm generally forbidden from playing a cleric in our D&D games because a) I tend to actually play someone with a deep, personal relationship with the awful, awful deities of D&D and b) I can rarely be bothered to take healing spells. I'm here to smite the unbeliever and convert the heathen, not keep your ass from dying when you run into a horde of goblins. Again. Buy a healing potion and shut up, unless you want smoten by The Lord!
ReplyDeleteI'm with you, cap. I'm prone to playing Warhammer-eque inquistor type clerics who want to purify everything with fire. Other players love it when you volunteer to be the keeper of the flame (read: torchbearer) and nuke everything from orbit, but then they get all squirrelly when you're idea of healing is cauterization for every injury. Go figure.
ReplyDeleteIf a knife wound does 1d4, then d6 is _a lot_ of healing just for drinking some booze. It's ok for conan types with tons of HP but mooks are going to go from death's door to fine.
ReplyDeleteI'm fully in favor of HP representing real damage and not abstract luck or anything like that. I realize the abstract excuse is just a hand waving cover story to help make the HP system make sense but I think it hurts sense making in the long run. Today I realize it's just meta, genre simulation, not realistic at all and I'm ok with that. Main characters are just tougher to kill. On the other hand some people are just naturally tough and they weren't born that way, so it does make some sense.
The HP system is one of the first things I objected to when I went through my critical of D&D phase that led to me playing way too much Vampire in the 90s.
Food for thought...
DeleteIf hit points are abstract combinations of luck, toughness, agility, etc, then why doesn't damage likewise scale up with levels? We could argue that luck, agility, pinpointing vulnerable areas, etc should increase with levels and thus the damage a PC/creature can dish out would likewise increase.
If a knife wound does 1d4, then d6 is _a lot_ of healing just for drinking some booze.
DeleteWhat if it was PCP?
I can't grok being so okay with HP and so against Healing Surges. They're both abstractions of the same sort of thing, just at different scopes. Being against the entire construct, sure, or rolling with it, I get... but liking one and hating the other is schizophrenic.
ReplyDeleteWhat I am against is another abstraction sitting on top of the original abstraction.
DeleteOnce you go there, what's one more abstraction?
DeleteWith a small but vital change, Mike Mearl's proposal actually has the possibility of making it a lot less abstract: by introducing a separate value for real actual damage. One that's pure meat, and doesn't go up by level. Hitpoints are the luck/divine favour/energy/experience aspect, and once that runs out, you take real physical damage that's hard to heal. Recovering hitpoints can be easy and fast, because it doesn't represent serious damage, and it can go up in level, since it represents experience instead of bulk.
"Once you go there, what's one more abstraction?"
DeleteThis is obviously a matter of taste and I'm not sure more discussion will help change anyone's mind.
Anyone wanting to do 'meat damage' to, say, a character's Con score, can probably keep the PCs alive a little longer without a lot of new mechanics. Me, I don't want more than one number to track on NPCs and monsters.
"What I am against is another abstraction sitting on top of the original abstraction."
DeleteThat's pretty reasonable, and makes sense to me.
I think that if you abstract it too far, you end up with a single dice roll to win the quest.
DeleteYou could abstract it even further and just say 'I win.'
There is such a thing as too much abstraction.
I think the "swig some booze for d6 restored" was an Arnesonism - at least I recall seeing it mentioned on a Q&A thread of his somewhere.
ReplyDeleteComparing D&D hit points to Runequest hits you can see the merit of both arguments. The problem for me has always been recuperation. I don't like clerics. I don't like bright red drinks in glass bottles. So players tend to stew in their wounds and become ultra cautious. I think the answer is to go back to the old literary romances and fairy tales and just admit to the extraordinary nature of the players' characters. Yield to the hero.
ReplyDeleteWhy only one booze-up per session? Let the players drink multiple times, at the cost of getting progressively more and more sloshed.
ReplyDeletePlayers don't really need any additional encouragement to be reckless and stupid.
DeleteI rule: You can booze it up a number of times equal to your CON mod. After that, you get -2 hit/damage/reflex for each swig.
ReplyDeleteNice.
Delete"Liquid Courage" may be found on page 18 of Fight On! #5, in an article by David "Sham" Bowman.
ReplyDeleteMany great ideas here, and I agree, down with healing surges!
ReplyDelete@ cappadocius: It's funny, I always assumed that the reason folks don't seem to play clerics much was not to avoid being a heal-bot, but specifically because they didn't want to be burdened with constantly having to represent some divine being, for good or ill. Maybe it's just my assumption, but it seemed like the moderately decent spells, attacks and armor that clerics have gotten throughout several editions were a bribe to play one.
ReplyDelete@Peter K: In my game clerics have to take vows like the Wu Jen in Oriental Adventures. If they break their vows they lose their powers. As a result they've gone from the least popular to most popular class in my game - as long as the players fulfill their vows, they feel justified in acting however they please.
DeleteThe idea that sits best with me is that characters have both some luck/inner strength points to resist damage which refresh periodically (usually daily), but also some "actual physical injury" points to which take longer to heal. Kind of like the wounds/vitality system.
ReplyDeleteI've been piecing together something along these lines that ties in with spell points as well. So pouring on your magic for the day is going to make it harder to shrug off damage, and avoiding long term damage makes you too exhausted to cast spells.
I like Alexis' boozing rules: http://tao-dnd.blogspot.com/2012/05/blessed-drunkedness.html
ReplyDeleteThe only way I would ever allow this is if the PCs acted as Hulk Hogan. The entire campaign, brother.
ReplyDeleteNo Hulk, no Hulking up.
Hi there. I followed you over from Discourse.
ReplyDeleteThe idea behind number two is interesting. I'm not so sure it would work in my campaigns, since dwarves are required to drink alcohol at least once a day or they get penalties. But, that's what makes a house rule a house rule, right? =]
I definitely agree with number three. Even with a cleric in our first campaign, Tess was more apt to memorize utility spells (produce flame, hold, sanctuary, bless, etc) than anything else. Sometimes she wouldn't bother with cure light wounds.
Currently the girls are playing two fighters and a thief.
Well, the thief just died, so scratch that. Heh.
Liquid Courage is great: adopting it now. Cf Jaegerdraft...
ReplyDeleteI disagree regarding clerics simply as dungeon medics. Sure, their the guys you run to when you bleeding like a stuck pig, but I have seen time and time again my share of clerics trading blows against some ugly in a melee round. Healing surges- no matter if it's a given power or out of a wineskin- suck dirty ghoul balls as far as I'm concerned.
ReplyDeleteI am fine with clerics being walking medivacs, particularly at first and second levels. I am fine with players that want to load up on one spell.
ReplyDeletePlayers may enjoy the game in the way they want to.
After all, who cares what the DM thinks? :-D
I'm sure I'm not the first person on the internet to suggest this, but:
ReplyDeleteHealing surges must have been intended to solve the social game-table problems of a) character death knocking a player out of the game for some amount of time and b) players of clerics feeling like they have to take responsibility for the entire party's health all the time, which may not be fun. I've found that these problems can be circumvented by a) allowing a character to regain all her hit points by resting overnight and b) removing all or almost all sources of supernatural healing from the game. (Naturally both of these solutions require the wholehearted embrace of an abstract interpretation of hit points.) Dropping to or below zero hit points may indeed result in a fatality, but (according to a die roll) it may also result in a serious but treatable injury or unconsciousness - conditions from which the character can recover, regaining a single hit point, if proper treatment is given.
That's actually how 4E works, though: after an extended rest ("resting overnight") characters regain all lost hit points and any expended healing surges.
DeleteHealing Surges are actually there to compensate for some healing abilities being limited to X times per-encounter, instead of X times a day. Pre-AEDU, a cleric could heal a fixed number times (and a capped number of hit points) a day. With AEDU but without healing surges, parties could theoretically just go and go and no without needing to take set up camp for the night. It's a mechanism intended (successfully or not) to make series of small fights threatening over the course of a day.
Justin of The Alexandrian sums up my thoughts on the matter here: http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/1034/roleplaying-games/explaining-hit-points.
ReplyDeleteFor me the key bit is this section towards the bottom:
"Which leaves the only significant and intractable problem with the hit point abstraction: The cure spells. Despite the fact that the number of hit points required to represent a wound with a particular severity varies depending on the character’s total hit points, a cure spell heals a flat number of hit points. Thus, a cure light wounds spell used on a 1st level fighter will heal grievous wounds. When the same spell is used on a 10th level fighter, on the other hand, it can’t handle more than a scratch.
This is a legacy issue which has been retained for reasons of game balance. But if you want to fix this, simply have cure spells work more like natural healing: Multiply the number of hit points cured by the creature’s HD."
The issue isn't with hit points but with the healing spells. Fix the healing spells and much of the craziness of hit points goes away.
The way I work it is that magical healing does 1d6xlevel while other mundane things (like bandages, healing salves, strange fungi found in the wild, etc.) will just heal 1d6 or 1d4 hit points. That way the Clerics never feel like they have to memorize more than one or two of the cure spells and there are other methods for healing.
A choice quote from that blog post: "We want to make the cleric as optional for a group as a fighter, wizard, or rogue."
ReplyDeleteHaving played and DMed a fair amount of Living Greyhawk and Pathfinder Society, you are never guaranteed having a heal-bot cleric in your party, so instead pretty much every PC seemed to have a wand of cure light wounds they would hand out to any divine caster (which was often a multiclassed Ranger) to heal them up after an encounter. There was a Spell Compendium spell called 'Lesser Vigor' which gave you fast healing 1 for 11 rounds with a 1st. level wand; which was popular at the end of LG, and much better than 1d8+1.
To me, Healing surges and short rests were just the latest way to de-itemize this required healing accessory for all character. Hordes of smelly convention gamers have been playing with the stupid wand system for 10+ years but I think it at least makes sense as opposed to repurposing Hit Dice into some kind of new healing surge system.
I utterly reject the idea that clerics are less optional under any edition I've played extensively. Cleric free parties have prospered across at least the first 25 years of the game.
DeleteYou are missing part of the game if you are always loaded up on healing items. I have had a lot of great adventures with say a ranger, an MU, and a thief of 6th-9th level wandering around with one or two healing potions and strict 1 hp/day recovery. It's an attrition game then, and you have to think carefully about fights - sure you can kill those four bugbears if you need to, but do you really want to risk losing 10 hp each over that? Is it worth it?
DeleteI'd go so far as to say that a lot of high level play just isn't as fun for me with a cleric or indefinite healing around. Although combat was slow I thought 3e worked better for combat at levels 15+ than earlier editions, but at levels 6-12 I tend to prefer the attrition adventure style to the 'heal up after every fight' style.
"3) If clerics are nothing but wandering medkits then the problem is in the campaign, not the friggin' combat rules. Give your players some kickass gods to worship, ecclesiastical authorities to cheese off, holy shrines to visit, etc."
ReplyDeleteWhat you do is give XP for GP.
The reason why so many tend toward healing spells is because the game is effing DEADLY. Even kitted out with healing spells, nothing stops a bunch of high-rolling skeleton archers from wiping you out if they get surprise and win initiative.
Which is why you want to avoid the baddies, find the treasure, and get out fast. Which doesn't work if the only (non-railroady) source of XP is beating up monsters.
In my clericless campaign, I'm always in search of ways to parsel out healing capacity to the PCs. My latest endeavor is allowing overnight rest to "heal" a portion of lost HPs.
ReplyDeleteI'd love to find a way to incorporate clerics into my game but, as a product of the Judeo-Christian culture that is prevalent in the western world, I can't wrap my head around pantheistic theology. It seems unlikely to me that gods with awesome magic hammers or the ability to screw countless virgins whilst in the guise of a bull would really give a crap if some a-hole is out spreading the faith and foreswearing edged weapons in my name.
What a given cleric believes and the reality of a campaign world need not have any connection. All gods could be aspects of the one true god, or they could be aliens, or they could be using psychic power. Not everything needs to be explained.
DeleteAbsolutely. But an understanding of how folks in our world actually perceive(d) Thor or Zeus or Osiris or Kali or whoever would help to make whatever cosmology I come up with that much richer; even if it is out of touch with the "reality" of the game. It's not so much about explaining how the gods work in the game as it is about adding depth to their following.
DeleteThis thread is the first time I've really "got" the confusion between the various editions (I've been deliberately not paying attention, but this issue seems to touch on a lot of systems) - the variety of assumptions flying around here is dizzying.
ReplyDelete(and just like everyone else I've made up my own justifications for hp which can't be found in any published edition, and so some things make sense to my understanding and others don't.)