It will similarly annoy the heck out of you if you (like me) enjoy narrativist games.
And can I just add how thrilled I am to see The Forge RPG terminology being used in this thread … !
I remember the epic threads in rec.games.frp.advocacy where that terminology was hashed out to begin with.
No, the existence of marks doesn’t bother me. It’s the fact that they overwrite each other. Don’t even get me started on that.
I haven’t played 2E in well over a decade, so the details are lost in a hazy overwhelming impression. I’m sure you had many great games with it. I did too; I wasn’t trying to imply it was unplayable. But it did become messy and disjointed, and the number of books and supplements became so unwieldy, none of which seemed to take the esistence of each other into account.
Offhand, the Complete X series of books had craploads of broken “Kits”, and the power creep as the series went on meant that later books had more and more powerful kits. The *Player’s Option *hardbacks were full of really poorly thought out subsystems.
I did like the Monstrous Compendium, though (the big folders which you could insert monsters into).
I don’t have a problem per se with a game being more “gamist” and less “simulationist”. Hell, chess has been around for ages longer than D&D, and will last ages longer, and it doesn’t even make a pretense of simulation (why is a friggin’ castle the second-most mobile piece on the board? Why can holy men only move diagonally? Why is the queen so much more powerful than the king?). But it also doesn’t claim to be a role-playing game, either.
Oh, yeah. A lot of those later supplements didn’t seem useful or interesting so we never used them. I think the idea was that different groups would choose different combinations of those books to use; they were supposed to be independent of each other.
Some things which became more formally established in 2E were actually incorporated in our game earlier. We got a lot out of nonweapon proficiencies (which we started using when the 1E Wilderness Survival Guide came out) and cantrips (which we started using when they were in Dragon). Some of the most memorable game sessions involved low-level characters using low-power skills in inspired ways. We used a version of the magical schools customized to our world, and a lot of effort went into the magical lore and research side of the campaign.
Those “kits” seemed to be intended as help for maybe inexperienced players to develop characters whose abilities reflected their persona, and vice-versa. We were far down that road and didn’t need the help. We did use some other bits and pieces from the first few character class books, where it fit with what we were already doing or wanting to do.
This is obviously a game balance issue. If they DIDN’T, you could have a group of 4 fighters, and they could all mark a target, and that target would then be at -6 to hit any of them. Maybe you could rule it that the -2 penalty doesn’t stack, but it’s clearly simpler just to have them overwrite. Also, nitpicking. There are way larger issues with the system, even viewed strictly from a “WTF does this represent?” standpoint than this.
On gameplay flaws of the early editions, I always though HP and healing were the mechanic that hindered adventure flow the most.
Our best house-ruling of 1/2/3rd editions was for hit point recovery. Only the bottom 20% of your HP are debilitating physical wounds, the top 80% are akin to stamina and fully recover after a reasonable rest period between encounters. We used a sports half-time as the guidance – a running back takes a pummeling and can barely walk after 30 minutes of plays, but gets his wind after a short break and returns at 100% performance barring an actual injury.
This had incredible game-play enablers:
–Clerics could play a role beyond just being heal-bots
–Heal spells have greater efficacy relative to the wounds
–Removed the attack - camp and relearn spells - attack repetition cycle.
–Low hit point characters weren’t constantly limping around fearing a one-hit kill
Ironically (since you indicated you generally don’t like 4E), hit points and healing in 4E look an awful lot like this.
- The primary healing power of clerics (and other “leaders”) is a minor action, thus letting them still be offensive threats in combat while seeing to their allies’ wounds
- At worst, a healing power (or even taking a “second wind”, which is a healing action that anyone can do for themselves) heals 1/4 of your hit points. A cleric can often get a bloodied character (blooded = at 1/2 of your hit points or below) back to full health (or close to it) with a single use of Healing Word (which is a basic healing power). No more tapping a higher-level character 20 times with a Cure Light Wounds wand.
- Resting for a few minutes is usually enough for most characters to heal up (especially if they have a cleric or other leader boosting their healing), as well as regaining many of their attack powers (the encounter-level ones, anyway).
- All first-level PCs start out with hit point totals in the 20s or even 30s. While one-hit kills on low-level PCs are possible, they’re unlikely (usually the result of a crit from a monster who gets additional damage on a crit).
I’m glad I wasn’t the only one who read that and thought “that sounds a lot like the 4E healing rules”.
I understand your starting logic, but I don’t see why it would be the “bottom” and “top.” That is, why should the first hits always be only the stamina points? Wouldn’t it make more sense to either divide all damage according to those proportions, or to have a mechanism for assigning any given hit one way or the other?
Also, I wonder how many people using either a personal rule like this or the 4E rules actually give the NPC opponents the same consideration.
The presumption is that the first batch of hitpoints represents your heroic skill in not taking a serious injury. Once you take a serious wound, that hampers your ability to stop being shanked.
Well, in essence that’s the 1E/2E theory of hit points, too; that’s largely why characters get more at higher levels. But the points are counted together for simplicity.
Suppose a healthy character is shot with an arrow in a surprise attack from the rear. Shouldn’t at least some of that damage be a real physical wound, right away?
And there’s different kinds of stamina. The running back may be able to come back in the second half and play about as well, but he’s not going to be able to do that again the next day and the next and the next, too. Even without an “actual injury,” football, or medieval combat, is generally a beating. If kenobi’s description of 4E healing is accurate, it sounds ridiculous. “Take a second wind” or “rest for a few minutes” from time to time and you can keep soldiering on forever, no need for longer-term recovery?
Pretty much. We also had a home-brew critical hit system that could skip the stamina portion and go directly against the wound portion. This solved the inevitable player complaint of “What? Is my perfectly shot arrow simply stuck hovering in his manly stamina?”
It was nicknamed the Fabio-field, and hilarity ensued.
d20 Star Wars basically had this, with wounds and vitality (I think, the exact terms may differ) as different pools. So long as you have vitality left, that’s where damage goes. It’s easy to replenish. Wounds are hard to replenish, don’t increase with level, and you don’t get a lot of them. Critical hits go directly to wounds, bypassing vitality, which often meant a one hit KO.
The one thing I didn’t include is that, in 4E, you can’t do that “forever”. A PC has only so many “healing surges” they can spend per day (most PCs have somewhere around 8, “tanks” might have a dozen or so). Taking a second wind costs you a healing surge. Every time your cleric uses Healing Word on you, it costs you a healing surge.
Once you run out of healing surges, things start to not look so pretty, and your options for regaining hit points become very limited. If you get knocked to 0 hit points, and don’t have any healing surges remaining, you’re likely to die.
Some classes (clerics in particular) have abilities which allow for “surgeless healing” (i.e., you can regain hit points without spending a healing surge), but those are far less common.
When you take an “extended rest” (i.e., camp and sleep for 6 hours), you end the extended rest at full hit points, and have your full complement of healing surges restored.
So, from the standpoint of “longer term recovery”, all you need is 6 hours of rest. But, in prior editions of D&D, there usually wasn’t a need for “longer term recovery”, either – if you were down a ton of hit points, you camped, your cleric got his spells back, and healed you. (Yes, there were corner cases, like ability score damage / drain, or not having access to curative magic, but those were the exceptions to the rule.)
Yup, Vitality Points and Wound Points. Running out of VPs didn’t hurt much, if at all. Taking any WP damage put you at a penalty, and losing them all meant you were dying.
VPs were roughly analagous to HPs (you got more with every level, you got a bonus for high Con, and combat classes (soldiers and Jedi) got bigger dice). Your WP score was equal to your Con score, and it didn’t go up with level.
Note that the most recent version of d20 Star Wars, “Saga Edition”, which came out about a year before 4E D&D, was in many ways a test bed for 4E concepts, and it did away with VP/WP, in place of a simple hit point total.
I’m perhaps the only RPG player who thinks that D&D-style hit points make more sense if you actually take them literally. The way I see it, it takes about 200 points of damage to reduce a human body completely to hamburger, but it’s generally a lot easier than that to do enough damage to kill someone. Your typical sedentary nerd (like, say, a 1st-level wizard) is likely to die from a single attack with a knife, even though that represents hardly any damage to the body as a whole. That 20th-level barbarian, though, you’re not going to be able to stop unless you pretty much do reduce him completely to hamburger, so he’s listed as having those 200 HP. And yes, there are plenty of real-world stories of major badasses taking a lot more actual damage to their body than that one knife-wound, and still soldiering on: Consider Simo Häyhä (a high-level fighter-type if there ever was one), for instance, who literally survived getting half his head blown off, and was still the best sniper in the world afterwards.
Ye gods, no. In fact, after years of listening to the crazy, abstract hand-waving spiels about what hit points represent, I just told the players:
[ul]
[li]Hit points are real. They are part of the metaphysics of the realm you live in, and come from the Positive Material Plane, unless you’re undead in which case they come from the Negative Material Plane.[/li][li]Your character knows about them, but they don’t call them hit points, they call them Vital Force, which is measured in Fork Units. Your Vital Force in F.U.s is the number of times you can be vigorously poked with a fork before suddenly succumbing to the damage all at once.[/li][li]As you gain more experience, you draw more life-binding vital force from the Positive Material Plane. Scientists believe they may soon discover a way to measure and track this progress, which seems to lead to advancement in skills and Vital Force at intervals that occur on a steepening scale.[/li][/ul]
It sounds like your game world is the same one that the Order of the Stick inhabits. 