Legends & Lore: Hit Points, Take 3

Another Legends & Lore about hit points?

The short of it is that for the “entry point” at least, hit points will largely represent physical trauma that you can recover with either magic or extensive periods of rest, the latter of which can only get you to the halfway mark unless you rest in a “comfortable” area. Dungeons & Dragons has an extensive history with plenty of takes on hit points both official and optional, so I am curious as to why they are settling on this as the default benchmark.

For starters, why does resting in a “dungeon” locale cap you at half? It makes no sense that you heal up to a certain point, after which there is just no benefit whatsoever. It reminds me of Final Fantasy, where tents restored a set amount of hit points, but houses and inns healed you to full.

“ZOMG, D&D Next is like a video game!”

The strangest part about this is that I always assumed that a good chunk of hit points were near misses, or minor scratches at worst. The real damage occurred the closer you got to zero, after which you were pretty badly wounded. So, what? You can heal enough to get back on your feet and fight without any penalties, just not enough to recover the last few cuts and bruises? If I rest in a dungeon for a couple of days, why do I still see absolutely no improvement?

Another issue is that it needlessly stresses the importance of magical healing, which itself operates needlessly on a largely per-day magic system. Short tangent: Dungeons & Dragons has plenty of magic systems to choose from or use as a foundation, so as with hit points I have to ask why we need to use basically the worst in terms of resource management and sense I have seen as the basis?

At any rate I think that both forcing people to rely on clerics and the like, and changing the rules to accommodate parties without one, are both terrible ideas. Why not just make the game work by default, and then add rules modules to tweak them after the fact? What if a group lacks a cleric, but then picks one up later? Do we change the rules again?

As strange as the first two bullet points are to me, I get it because that is pretty much how D&D operated pre-4th Edition (not that I think it is a sufficient reason to roll things back, mind you). The third point? I have no idea. I guess Mearls thinks that if you have to go back to town more often to get back the last half of your hit points that time apparently forgot, you might interact more with the population.

Personally if your group is the type that likes social interaction, they are going to do that anyway. Otherwise I think no matter how many times they sum up their trip to town, that they are suddenly going to start chatting it up with the blacksmith just to, I dunno, break up the repetition? If you want to get your players to interact with the population, there are more interesting and compelling ways to do so than making a pseudo-functional, passive-aggressive hit point system.

I know people used to claim that 4th Edition came across as a video game, but this system of half-way healing, potion-popping, cure-spamming hit point management screams video game to me more than healing surges and encounter powers ever did.

“Human Cleric (Lightbringer) 15 LFG!”

If anything good has come out of this article, is that it has inspired me to add some more to my ideal hit point system, namely a healing rate:

A character’s healing rate would be determined by her level, Constitution, class, and/or situational modifiers like location or class features. For example as a baseline barbarians would heal faster than fighters, who heal faster than rogues, who heal faster than wizards. A particularly durable wizard might heal faster than a rogue, especially if that rogue has a low Constitution. You could make things more complex by giving classes a healing rate bonus, maybe even make it a talent, so that if you stick around in fighter long enough you could eventually heal faster than, say, a multiclass barbarian/sorcerer.

As for class features, clerics might have some kind of healing prayer ability that boost everyone’s healing rate, druids could heal faster in the wilderness, and rangers might be able to boost the location-based healing effect in specific terrain. Since exploration turns are based on 10 minute/1 hour units, I could even give characters an hourly healing rate, or make it so that clerics have a healing aura that gives everyone a 10-minute/hour recovery time, which if coupled with rapidly-refreshing vitality points would make healing magic less necessary.

DDN Q&A: Wound Modules, Uncommon Choices, and Humans

There are two reasons that can pretty much sum up why I am unsatisfied with hit points in Next: you do not start with enough, and you are largely reliant on magic to get them back.

When I tried running Age of Worms in 3rd Edition several months ago, the characters ended up having to rest every few rooms due to the lack of a cleric. In my Next campaign Hit Dice have made things a bit smoother, but ultimately it depends on how many cure wounds spells the druid and ranger have on tap.

The talk of a variety of hit point modules is good, I guess, so long as at least one of them lets you play without having to have magical healing. I think I have said before that my ideal hit point system would be something like the vitality- and wound-point split that I first saw in 3rd Edition’s Unearthed Arcana (and that I maybe saw later in one of the Star Wars games), where wound points are based on your Constitution score, and vitality points are derived from class.

Wound points would recover more slowly over time, maybe based on your Constitution modifier. Certain attacks like poison, maybe critical hits, could directly apply to wound points. Vitality points would recover much more quickly, being the more abstract part generally reflected by combat skill, luck, etc. Things like warlord “shouts” could be used to recover them in combat, as well. I would also do something like Dragon Age: Origins, where getting reduced to zero wound points slaps you with a persistent injury that recovers over time.

As for halfling barbarians, I think that 4th Edition did oddball combinations best by making it so that while certain race/class combinations were more ideal, the rest were still capable of contributing in a meaningful manner. Like, a half-orc barbarian would probably start out with a Strength score of 18, but the benchmark was 16, which a halfling could still do. The ironic downside with Next is that given the 20 cap on ability scores, even before all the talk of stat-boosting feats, everyone will end up with the same score no matter their size category.

Humans used to be a very fun race to play because you got a variety of floating bonuses. Now its just a bonus to all your stats, and…that is it. Pretty easy to build with, but really boring. I do not think that humans should just be the “speed-building” race, especially when it means that they are as strong, tough, fast, smart, wise, etc as other races that are supposed to have those traits as a shtick.

Legends & Lore: Hit Points, Our Old Friend

Huh…so, healing surges by another name?

The only difference that I can see is that you regain randomized amounts of hit points instead of a flat value. Actually, I guess it is based on your level so they increase faster? It kind of reminds me of Dragon Age, where you regain a random amount of hit points after every encounter, though I get the idea that you only get X amount of rolls per day since you regain Hit Dice by resting. Eh, seems like a nice middle ground, and since it is variable it adds in an element of uncertainty and risk.

Trying to explain how hit points translate into the game world is a debate that has existed since hit points were created, despite multiple attempts from one of the game’s creators, game designers of other editions, and community members. For the most part the bullet points again reiterate things that we (should) know: a character’s physical endurance, ability to turn lethal blows into something non-lethal, and plot relevancy.

What is more interesting is how the following section breaks up damage interpretation based on a characters hit points, which range from superficial to serious. It kind of models how I had been doing it in 4th Edition, in which characters take meaningful injuries when they become bloodied or are reduced to 0 or less (and just recently I started using persistent injuries for characters that get dropped).

Now back to Diablo 3. I plan on beating Hell difficulty before the playtest opens up, so I can focus my attention on converting Age of Worms to 5th Edition.