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P.d0t posted:Hey look, I made 5th Edition. No but magic healing items aren't actually magic items though dude.
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Jan 12, 2015 08:03
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AlphaDog posted:A constant in this thread is people saying "The rules are fine, once you make the following changes to get rid of the stupid parts. Why is everyone making GBS threads on the rules, which are fine?"  The rules are great. You just haven't fixed them enough, you see? Do you see? It's your fault.
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Jan 12, 2015 08:05
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Quantumfate posted:This is why I say it's a philosophy thing. I'm not as on board with going "nah, your potions don't heal you when you drink them because you spent all your healing points today" Potion of Cure Light Wounds posted:Effect: You drink the potion. If you have a healing surge, you must spend one. Instead of the hit points you would normally regain, you regain 1d8 + 1 hit points. If you are bloodied and don’t have any healing surges, you still regain the hit points. If neither of these things is true, there is no effect. At which point you still have Some healing, when you really need it (below 50% hp), but your system can still be built around damage assumptions that say roughly people have access to X HP per day, so a rough day would constitute monsters dealing some % of that damage on average. From that, you can also do things like outline intelligent progressions and benchmarks for monster damage, assuming that at a certain % to-hit they would do a certain average damage per fight to a target, then leave those guidelines in a book like MM or DMG and so people can build monsters that swing fairly across the board and can be used with one another (both created by DMs at the table and pre-existing in sourcebooks) without having to eyeball it, shrug, and fudge dice when stuff gets all fucky. So you can kind of squint and see where designers doing all that sticky icky math work comes in --- nothing exists in a vacuum in a well-designed system, so even when you have theoretically-infinite things built in (what if you always stay below 50% hp and chug healing potions outside of combat? you can go forever!) there's still the "if you're out of surges and below 50% the whole time" caveats built in to try and shove those edge cases further out to the edge. The system isn't designed around shrugging and saying "well you could heal whenever whatever, so, sure these numbers work, I dunno I'm tired what's for lunch." It's not even a philosophy, really, to claim that the contrary works just as well. Unless your philosophy is "I don't care that people didn't learn anything from the last 5 years of the product line they were hired to work on, and indeed, I am fine with smoothing over the rough edges from their non-work because hey, I already paid for it and got this far." In which case yes. It is a philosophy, I will concede this.
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Jan 12, 2015 08:07
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Quantumfate posted:I recall that without a leader, consumables or magic items, for the most part you could really only heal out of combat with healing surges. Second wind aside. I mean, 4e was huge, so I've no doubt there's a ton of variant class features and examples that give, say, fighters and rogues a stack of encounters to spend healing surges with. Thing is, that falls apart heavily at different levels. Your hit points will be around 20 times more at level 20 than they are at level 1, but your wealth by level will have drastically increased. By even the mid levels a wand of cure light wounds is less of an expense and more a trivial item you keep a dozen of in the Bag of Holding in case you run out. On the other hand, actions never scale, and often healing in combat is best served doing literally anything else, such as killing the monster before it kills your friends. It doesn't help that in many editions a cleric is often way more potent on offence than defense. Plain and simple, the problem is that 3.5 / 5E style healing just doesn't scale well with any other systems. Also basing it on consumables and not having a hard cap makes gauging encounters much harder. If you developed your dungeon for a 5-potion party but they bought 10, your dungeon's much less difficult. With healing surges there's at least a map of expectations for the developers to work with. The Bee fucked around with this message at 08:12 on Jan 12, 2015 |
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Jan 12, 2015 08:09
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Quantumfate posted:Players walking around with a ton of wands that they just zap themselves seems like a poor example. If your players really want to walk around with wands and make all those checks to heal- why say no, you can't? There's still an idea and feeling of expenditure when it comes to consumables. Especially as that often means forfeiting an action within combat. First off, there are still plenty of effects that heal you after your healing surges ran out. Healing potions still work, and if you want to give your players millions of them then you can. The point is the system allows you to play without them and still have a working game. You can play without and leaders straight out of the PHB and you'll actually still be fine in-combat, since the lack of in-combat resilience will be made up for with more powerful damage (since you tend to gain strikers and controllers, not defenders). This isn't philosophy - if you want more healing, give your players more healing. The problem comes when you have really swingy combats and healing that doesn't scale, and the healing that is available ends up being crazy good (wands of lesser vigor). It's a system that has no moderation, and makes play difficult and DMing even harder. edit: f,b;
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Jan 12, 2015 08:11
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Quantumfate posted:I guess it's a philosophy thing. Okay, hi, hello. Here's what's up- fights have to have a chance of failure or they might as well not exist. And if they take up a lot of time and brainspace, like they do in D&D, success or failure have to be based on player brain-usage somewhat and also be fun. So you have three ways you can introduce failure: - Sudden (rocket tag) - Gradual (bad play expends resources, and when they're gone rocket tag occurs) - Not at all So if HP can be bought in large quantities, as it can in 3E and 5E, your resource is gold. Gold sucks as a resource because we give you a lot of it so you can save up for cool stuff, and so the effect of spending lots of gold on consumables is so detached from the consequences of doing so (you might not notice a problem for MONTHS) that allowing players to screw themselves by using gold inappropriately is dumb and unfun so basically no DM will ever let this happen. That plus the crazy gold scaling of D&D to begin with means that if you allow players to purchase HP limited only by their cashflow, HP as a depletable resource comes off the table. This basically means that you might as well be using Gamma World, as I mentioned earlier. For people who don't want to use Gamma World, not because of a weird sense of grognardy elitism, but because resource management is a real game mechanic that is fun to use, uncapped potion HP is really dumb. Combine all the complexity of Gamma World with all the fiddly bullshit of vanilla D&D and you've got a really dumb mechanic! Then on top of that, your ways of introducing failure comes down to: - Sudden - Not at all - Gradual through consumable abilities or something else I guess Abilities can work okay, but they suck when they run out- it's not risk/reward as you run out like with healing/HP resources. It's just "oh we can't fight again- call the king his daughter is dead". And in that sense, you have a complete ability to judge success before going into a fight which also makes failure somewhat illusory. There are ways of managing gradual failure without capped healing. It's done in lots of places. But it would require a somewhat deep nosejob to D&D to make it work, especially D&D 5E. And if you're going to do it, for god's sake make it consistent across levels and don't add fake beancounting on top of it, jesus.
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Jan 12, 2015 08:17
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Has anyone ever seen Quantumfate and MonsterEnvy in the same room? 
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Jan 12, 2015 08:28
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Oh and that's another thing. Play resources that depleted over the adventuring day, that is, Daily Powers, made up like 30% of your combat options TOPS. Expending resources amped up tension and risk. Now expending resources amps down your combat engagement.
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Jan 12, 2015 08:32
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I really hoped I would see something like the 3.5 Crusader return for 5e. It was basically a replacement paladin with some interesting mechanics (encounter abilities, but you randomly 'drew' them throughout the battle) that worked well as either a battlefield controller or a frontline bruiser (though it was much better at the former). Shame that so many people decried the Tome of Battle as being 'anime' - it was a great direction for melees.
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Jan 12, 2015 08:38
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quote:A character who drinks the magical red fluid in this vial regains 2d4 + 2 hit points. Drinking or administering a potion takes an action. Healing potions are legit candy-red Diablo potions now?
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Jan 12, 2015 08:45
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IT BEGINS posted:First off, there are still plenty of effects that heal you after your healing surges ran out. Healing potions still work, and if you want to give your players millions of them then you can. Actually potions did use up healing surges in 4E. Almost everything did. Surgeless healing was exceedingly rare, and pretty much always a daily ability.
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Jan 12, 2015 08:45
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goldjas posted:Actually potions did use up healing surges in 4E. Almost everything did. Surgeless healing was exceedingly rare, and pretty much always a daily ability. Surge-consuming heals would stabilize you even if you were out of surges. Is that what IT BEGINS meant?
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Jan 12, 2015 08:48
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30.5 Days posted:Surge-consuming heals would stabilize you even if you were out of surges. Is that what IT BEGINS meant? You could heal to somewhere around 60% hp with level-appropriate potions even after you ran out of healing surges. It did burn surges, though, if you still had them. Edit: I'm talking about the Cure Critical Wounds potions and the like from the later books, not the potions of healing from the PHB. IT BEGINS fucked around with this message at 08:55 on Jan 12, 2015 |
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Jan 12, 2015 08:52
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Quantumfate posted:Players walking around with a ton of wands that they just zap themselves seems like a poor example. If your players really want to walk around with wands and make all those checks to heal- why say no, you can't? There's still an idea and feeling of expenditure when it comes to consumables. Especially as that often means forfeiting an action within combat. For a mere 750g, an entire party can pretty much suffice for healing with the wand and need not worry about their HP in a given encounter up to their Max. Even if they hit 1, as long as there's not another encounter waiting for them immediately after, they can spend a few minutes with the wand and be back to peak HP. While PCs that start at first level might have a problem with this while budgeting their other equipment, it gets progressively easier if they start at a higher level or cut back a little on gear. No one's going to be healing in combat. Almost never. It's a waste of an action that could be better spent helping kill an enemy or making it harder for an enemy to hit an ally. All of this healing is done between encounters and takes up the space of a few minutes in game given that using the wand takes 6 seconds per cast.
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Jan 12, 2015 08:58
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Quantumfate posted:I recall that without a leader, consumables or magic items, for the most part you could really only heal out of combat with healing surges. Second wind aside. I mean, 4e was huge, so I've no doubt there's a ton of variant class features and examples that give, say, fighters and rogues a stack of encounters to spend healing surges with.
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Jan 12, 2015 08:58
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Well see when you heal in combat which is a real thing that people should do and is relevant to the concept of survivability,
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Jan 12, 2015 09:02
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IT BEGINS posted:You could heal to somewhere around 60% hp with level-appropriate potions even after you ran out of healing surges. It did burn surges, though, if you still had them. Er, can you point to the splatbook, because it's not in PHB1-3.
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Jan 12, 2015 09:12
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30.5 Days posted:Er, can you point to the splatbook, because it's not in PHB1-3. Mordenkainen's Magnificent Emporium. They restore from 1d8+1 to 4d8+30 HP and burn a healing surge, but still heal you if you don't have surges but are bloodied.
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Jan 12, 2015 09:17
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To be fair, that was one of the last 4E books published if I remember correctly.
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Jan 12, 2015 09:20
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IT BEGINS posted:Mordenkainen's Magnificent Emporium. They restore from 1d8+1 to 4d8+30 HP and burn a healing surge, but still heal you if you don't have surges but are bloodied. Written under the R&D Group leadership of one Michael Mearls. I mean basically one item in a splatbook written post-essentials doesn't mean that surgeless healing was broadly possible, it means that Mearls-led WotC never at any point understood 4E's design. FAKE EDIT 2: Also instead of Power (Consumable + Healing), which is what Potion of Healing says, it's a Power (Utility + Healing), which I think means it's supposed to be daily, even though it's not specified (and differs ENTIRELY FROM EVERY PHB ITEM POWER IN THAT MANNER WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE). 30.5 Days fucked around with this message at 09:29 on Jan 12, 2015 |
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Jan 12, 2015 09:21
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30.5 Days posted:Written under the R&D Group leadership of one Michael Mearls. Nobody will ever manage to convince me that Pathfinder didn't overtake 4e for any reason other than Mearls loving the whole product line with essentials.
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Jan 12, 2015 09:30
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Getting back to the original point, it isn't an issue of saying no to your players for 'philosophical' reasons. It turns out that, like most systems in RPGs, one of the best ways to design a mechanic is to make it powerful but limited. This makes it meaningful both as a system mechanic and as a psychological choice for your players. Making something infinite makes it either a less interesting binary choice, or makes the whole mechanic completely irrelevant.
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Jan 12, 2015 09:33
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Yeah I was the one who suggested CON score + full hit die + CON modifier for 1st level max HP. And then instead of Hit Dice healing, everyone has Reserve Points equal to their max HP. You can convert Reserve Points to HP at a 1:1 ratio during Short Rests. You can only regain Reserve Points by taking Long Rests. (Turns out that rule predates Iron Heroes, even. It shows up in 3.5 Unearthed Arcana. Mearls was a lazy designer even way back then) There's a variant rule in the Next DMG to allow you to spend up to half your Hit Dive healing in combat as an action, but I think trying to implement full Healing Surges is going to be a lot of work.
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Jan 12, 2015 09:36
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gradenko_2000 posted:I think trying to implement full Healing Surges is going to be a lot of work. Why? Off the top of my head, [Max HD value + Con mod] seems like a good number of surges.
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Jan 12, 2015 09:40
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P.d0t posted:Why? Off the top of my head, [Max HD value + Con mod] seems like a good number of surges. I mean as in reworking the healing sources to integrate with it. Granted I've not dug very deep into healing spells in Next beyond "they exist and Druids and Clerics cast them", so feel free to correct me on that.
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Jan 12, 2015 09:43
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I'd just make it like, "whenever you regain HP you can also spend a surge to regain [surge worth] of additional HP." Boom, done. People can now abuse it all they want because surges have been hard capped.
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Jan 12, 2015 09:45
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gradenko_2000 posted:There's a variant rule in the Next DMG to allow you to spend up to half your Hit Dive healing in combat as an action, but I think trying to implement full Healing Surges is going to be a lot of work. Naw it's not that hard. Add your level 1 HP rule, every players get hit die size/2 + con mod surges. All sources of healing do half the listed healing + 25% of your HP and consume a surge. Heals only stabilize you without any available surges. At the end of a short rest, you can consume as many surges as you like, but 0 bonus healing. This variant probably goes well with a Second Wind variant. So this is gonna break down at high levels probably because healing already scales to some extent, so I have no idea what happens then. But it's real easy to make up rules that might or might not work, that'll be $50 please.
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Jan 12, 2015 09:46
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P.d0t posted:I'd just make it like, "whenever you regain HP you can also spend a surge to regain [surge worth] of additional HP." Boom, done. You understand that unless "can" becomes "must', it's not a healing surge rule at all.
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Jan 12, 2015 09:47
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30.5 Days posted:You understand that unless "can" becomes "must', it's not a healing surge rule at all. The problem is that 5e doesn't really have encounter-based healing to speak of, so healing spells also have a built-in daily limitation. So i can chuck my "cure wounds" at a dude for the cost of a spell slot, he heals 1d8+WIS/CHA/whatever; I've burned a daily resource. if he also wants to burn a daily resource to spend a surge, go nuts.
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Jan 12, 2015 09:51
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P.d0t posted:The problem is that 5e doesn't really have encounter-based healing to speak of, so healing spells also have a built-in daily limitation. Maybe you should read some of the things posted in the past 3 pages.
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Jan 12, 2015 09:52
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30.5 Days posted:Maybe you should read some of the things posted in the past 3 pages. I mean, it doesn't tackle "access to healing" problems, yeah. I'm also literally making this up on the spot; I'm not gonna come up with a comprehensive solution that way.
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Jan 12, 2015 09:54
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P.d0t posted:I mean, it doesn't tackle "access to healing" problems, yeah. I'm also literally making this up on the spot; I'm not gonna come up with a comprehensive solution that way. Yes, it doesn't tackle "the problem that was identified", you're right.
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Jan 12, 2015 09:55
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Hey guys if you want to implement healing surges from 4E, which limited daily healing taken, all you need to do is add a new source of healing, limit it, and then not limit daily healing at all.
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Jan 12, 2015 09:57
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Well I'm too tired for this poo poo, make up a solution without me, I'm going to bed.
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Jan 12, 2015 09:58
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Let's be serious, low-level rocket tag was a problem as late as 3e: you'd throw an encounter that was, by the book, suitable for four first-level characters (say, two orcs) and because of chance the very first rolls of the very first combat ended up killing the Fighter because the orc happened to win initiative and roll a crit with their greataxe. Of course, even as 15-year olds we knew that was terrible and unfun and fudged it, but it was still pretty bad when first level, the entry point of the game, was also the most deadly. Like, according to common sense you'd expect the first level of the game to be the easiest one where you've got the training wheels on and lots of safety nets to prevent instant death, and then at high levels you'd ramp up the difficulty with bigger and badder monsters with various status effects on their attacks. Historically it works completely contrary to that in D&D. The first levels are when you're under a constant threat of death and once you manage to level up a character enough through sheer luck you will be facing bigger and badder enemies, but you'll already have so many different tricks up your characters' sleeves that they can deal with most of those threats without any trouble. And they were so close: the very first draft of the playtest rules had your starting hit points set at your Con score+class base, which would've immediately fixed the problem of first-level rocket tag, but it was later reverted to the current form because playtester feedback indicated that low hit points at first level was to them a feature, not a bug. Incidentally the same thing happened with the Pathfinder playtest: in the first version of the playtest first-level characters had many more hit points, but again it was changed due to actual feedback. I'm not quite sure what my point is anymore. I guess what I'm trying to say is that a problem I identified in D&D as a kid is seen as a feature by certain players, even though it goes against all of my gut instincts about how the difficulty curve in the game should look like. I guess I'm not in the target audience for D&D any more.
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Jan 12, 2015 10:15
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Low hit points at first level causing rocket tag gameplay is a problem that will never be fixed because most players will tell you that most players enjoy that style of gameplay and that most players will tell you that most players don't use houserules such as "maximum hit point rolls at first level" ideally, but it ruins the game when you roll a 1 so we just go with max. It's such an incredibly obvious flaw that even Hackmaster, which billed itself as "AD&D if AD&D was hardcore", went with "HP roll + con mod + 20" for hp at first level. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 10:46 on Jan 12, 2015 |
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Jan 12, 2015 10:41
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I want to trick friends into playing 4e by house-ruling Surges into 5e and working from there until OOPS, YOU'RE ALL PLAYING 4th ED YOU SNOBBY GROGS HAHAHAHAHA. Can this work?
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Jan 12, 2015 11:15
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Monte Cook tried it with some success. "Hey how do you like my brand new PASSIVE PERCEPTION concept?"
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Jan 12, 2015 12:56
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So a friend of mine has been asked to play in a 5e game, and he said the only way he will play is if he can play a Minotaur bard who plays the cowbell. If they're starting at 10th level and he'll be getting +2 STR and +1 CON for being a Minotaur, and at least 1 lvl has to be Bard - what's the best his character sheet can look like?
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Jan 12, 2015 13:10
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First Bass posted:I want to trick friends into playing 4e by house-ruling Surges into 5e and working from there until OOPS, YOU'RE ALL PLAYING 4th ED YOU SNOBBY GROGS HAHAHAHAHA. Can this work? Rename at-will powers "immersive actions," and encounters "feats of verisimilitude." If they start getting too suspicious, just kill a PC at random.
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