I've played Pathfinder since it came out in 2009. In that entire time I've always played with wands of cure light wounds. Even after moving to the opposite side of the country I see people annoyed if you don't turn up to a PFS game with a wand on you(no matter if you have 0 XP). It seems like the idea of starting every fight at max HP is fairly firmly entrenched which is amusing as I know healing surges was a problem for many.
I've been playing 5e since it came out and I've seen people who are more than happy to start combats at less than full HP. I've also seen clerics be judicious in their use of spells so they have enough to heal the party.
For those not familiar with 5e's healing, it works like this: At each level you gain a hit die associated with your class. After taking an hour rest you may spend any number of these hit die and regain the number of hit points that you roll. After an 8 hour rest you regain half your total hit die and all of your hit points.
(I've accidentally houseruled this to be you get back all the hit die after an 8 hour rest).
I'm wondering what sort of effect introducing this to Pathfinder would have? I know contrary to my own experiences not everyone uses wands of CLW in their games, but have we reached a stage where the AP's largely assume you use them?
It seems like clerics/oracles would get bumped down a couple of pegs as they wouldn't be able to devote all of their spells to buffing. Although from experience most of them still could be. However surely days would inevitably become a bit shorter which makes full casters like the wizard tend to shine while fighters lag behind in effectiveness.
What do people think? Has anyone considered it?
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i'm currently running Injury/Strain rules for my players.
Basically, all hit points heal back after a 10 minute rest (that is, all Strain), except the hit point damage which is sustained in the following way (Injuries):
-critical hit
-reduction to less than 0 HP
-natural 1 on damaging saving throw
-trap damage on a surprise round
-massive damage
I have noticed three side-effects to using this ruling (so far). One is that nobody carries around a cure wand. Two is that Clerics and other healers are still important, but get to save their spell slots for more fun spells. Three is that the party can handle much tougher fights back-to-back.
One of my players has stepped up to handle the extra bookwork, so that's nice. Overall, it feels more heroic than regular hit point rules. But we are still trying it out.
Played with something similar for a few years, although it went through several transformations.
At first there were two pools of hit points, like a simplified vitality/wounds system, whereas non-wound damage would heal quickly over a short rest and completely overnight.
Then there was Evil Lincoln's Strain houserule, bringing everything under a single pool of point.
Finally there was only hp and a "wounded" condition blocking rejuvenation of HPs to half.
Overall, it eliminated the need for wands, although cure spells were still necessary to cure wounds damage/condition; so not quite like 5e.
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I started tabletop gaming with 4th Edition, which has the healing surge system that 5th Edition's hit die (I hate that name) system evolved from. After a year or so of playing/studying 4th Edition, both my DM and I grew to dislike healing surges and came to the same conclusion. Healing surges eliminate healing/hitpoints as a long term resource. This reinforces the game as merely a daily sequence of skirmishes rather than an adventure. There's less tension because everyone can regain all their resources as long as they can rest for 8 hours. I don't like this. It was one of the many reasons I found 4th Edition so agonizingly boring to play.
In a response to an article by Sean K Reynolds, I proposed another solution: eliminate wands and make potions the price of a single wand charge. Potions have many inherent physical limitations to make them less of a trivial source for healing while maintaining them as a long term resource. The benefits of this are:
1) Action economy limitations of potions make clerical healing more valuable (easier to cast a healing spell on an ally during battle), but not as necessary (don't need UMD to use a potion).
2) Potions have greater difficulty to stockpile than wands. It's not easy to store 50 potions of CLW. Shoving them into a bag of holding or handy haversack has its own problems and risk breaking the bottles. It forces players to become creative with their storage.
3) Encourages players to buy more expensive cure consumables due to cheaper prices, action economy, and storage issues.
4) Makes potions the iconic source for consumable magic, as is the case for most fantasy settings and games.
The Injury/Strain system also has a "rub some gold on it" variant, where you can heal 1hp per 3gp (based on CLW wand pricing) during a rest period.
Essentially makes the CLW Wand a part of the system without requiring an actual healstick.
I think you could easily implement 5e's healing system in PF though. I don't expect any problems to come of it.
OTOH, it makes potions much cheaper and consequently much more commonly used for all those less commonly used things. All the utility stuff where potions are now the goto because you can't afford or don't need 50 charges worth, will now be always at hand. 1 or 2 of each instead of 50 of one.
That's a legitimate concern. I should have made it clear that oils do not benefit from my proposal, only potions. Most utility spells that make rogues obsolete do not target a creature.
That being said, I personally feel like the skill-eliminating spells is an issue worth tackling by itself.
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At first there were two pools of hit points, like a simplified vitality/wounds system, whereas non-wound damage would heal quickly over a short rest and completely overnight.
Then there was Evil Lincoln's Strain houserule, bringing everything under a single pool of point.
Finally there was only hp and a "wounded" condition blocking rejuvenation of HPs to half.
any chance you'd care to briefly weigh or summarize pros and cons of each?
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any chance you'd care to briefly weigh or summarize pros and cons of each?At first there were two pools of hit points, like a simplified vitality/wounds system, whereas non-wound damage would heal quickly over a short rest and completely overnight.
Then there was Evil Lincoln's Strain houserule, bringing everything under a single pool of point.
Finally there was only hp and a "wounded" condition blocking rejuvenation of HPs to half.
It's a balancing act between a rule we can relate to as human beings and ease of play at the table.
All three versions assume that hps are abstract representation of your your ability to withstand both tangible injuries and the exhaustion that one undergoes in combat. In other words, lost hps are not all cuts and broken bones, but nor are they all just huff and puff.
Having two distinct pools of points have the advantage of being clear, and its easy to give them two different healing rates. However, it skews balance at low levels either because PCs are extremely fragile (if you just divided their hp in two pools) or relatively resilient (if you basically duplicate their hps in two pools). Monsters have the same "problem". From experience, the problem balances itself around 5th-6th level and amplifies again around level 10th-12th where powerful PCs and/or monsters can be one-shotted with a good critical. That made for a very narrow sweet spot.
Evil Lincoln's Strain/Injury is much better and immediately solved that issue since all damage ultimately goes to the same pool, but with different qualitative. The concept is a bit more abstract and hard to "grasp" than having two separate pools but it worked much better in the D&D/Pathfinder frame, especially for monsters for whom you can just ignore that rule without unbalancing the PCs.
E-L underlying concept was great but it could be simplified with a simple "wounded? yes/no" condition. You miss on the "how badly are you injured" but you gain in eliminating bookkeeping.
I was thinking of a variant Wounds/Vitality system as well.
Vitality would be akin to subdual damage, healed at the rate of your hit die type (d6 to d12)/hour, with a bonus for fighter-types (surges when combat ends and so forth). In effect, you could regain vitality quickly without needing a healer, it's the magical/stamina aspect of hit points.
Health would be harder to regain (level/day), and naturally represent actual physical injury.
Cure spells would only heal health. Potions would heal both, with health coming first. In essence, the 'intangible' protection of Vitality is harder to heal then the physical injury. This turns Vitality into something akin to Temporary Hit points, which are indeed harder to accumulate and keep then cure spells of the same level.
As for infliction...the PC determines which he'd like any injury to take, from health or Vitality. This takes the whole problems with crits away, and leaves the PC to manage their hit points as they see best.
If he thinks he'll have some time to recover, or its his first hit, or he's going to suck a potion, he'll take it off of Vitality.
If he wants it quick mended after the fight, or someone is throwing Cures around, he'll take it off of health.
As an aside, this explains why monster hit points are different from characters. Hit points gained from classes is almost all vitality. Hit die from racial hit dice (most monsters) is all health. So, you're inflicting grievous wounds on the giant while he's basically whiffing you...until he lands one solid blow and down you go. It provides a good difference between learned hit points and natural hit points.
PC's will have lower health then Vitality in most cases.
I let them take side levels in the Racial Levels from 3.5E, which gives them up to 3 racial hit die and ups their health. Otherwise, their base health is their first level of hit points from class, the rest is Vitality. Toughness also ups health.
This way, a 10th level character might have 20 health and 80 Vit, and a cure serious wounds could get two characters back to full Health. If they have 3 Human Racial levels, their Health is 3d8+Conx3, + Toughness, and can go up significantly.
Don't let crits automatically go against health, leave it the player's choice, and crit-fishing is no longer a problem. But a wounded fighter with Health low can still recover his Vitality fast, and be able to fight soon without leaning on a cleric or healing magic.
I thought it was a decent compromise.
==Aelryinth
Contributor, RPG Superstar 2010 Top 8
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1.) You almost never heal in battle, and if you do, it's not with CLW wands, so this is a moot point. Out of battle not needing an UMD user/someone with CLW on spell list is good.
I've done a crap-ton of in combat healing with wands at low levels. Usually it means things are going very very wrong in an encounter, but sometimes that happens (bad die rolls, poor tactical choices, etc.).
A wand can make the difference between squeezing out a tough victory and a TPK
I started tabletop gaming with 4th Edition, which has the healing surge system that 5th Edition's hit die (I hate that name) system evolved from. After a year or so of playing/studying 4th Edition, both my DM and I grew to dislike healing surges and came to the same conclusion. Healing surges eliminate healing/hitpoints as a long term resource. This reinforces the game as merely a daily sequence of skirmishes rather than an adventure. There's less tension because everyone can regain all their resources as long as they can rest for 8 hours. I don't like this. It was one of the many reasons I found 4th Edition so agonizingly boring to play.
Stopping to rest every three encounters is more adventurous?
In my experience, once you get past about 3rd level, the party has enough resources to heal as much as needed between encounters. So for me the 3X/PF method just feels like a pointless gold drain, not tense adventure.
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I started tabletop gaming with 4th Edition, which has the healing surge system that 5th Edition's hit die (I hate that name) system evolved from. After a year or so of playing/studying 4th Edition, both my DM and I grew to dislike healing surges and came to the same conclusion. Healing surges eliminate healing/hitpoints as a long term resource. This reinforces the game as merely a daily sequence of skirmishes rather than an adventure. There's less tension because everyone can regain all their resources as long as they can rest for 8 hours. I don't like this. It was one of the many reasons I found 4th Edition so agonizingly boring to play.
Stopping to rest every three encounters is more adventurous?
In my experience, once you get past about 3rd level, the party has enough resources to heal as much as needed between encounters. So for me the 3X/PF method just feels like a pointless gold drain, not tense adventure.
Not quite. Let me elaborate on that, but I'll start off by saying that I'm NOT totally happy with how any modern edition of D&D handles hitpoints/healing as a resource.
From a design perspective, the entire game revolves around the concept of using encounters as a resource drain - each CR = APL encounter is mathematically designed to consume roughly 20% to 25% of your daily resources. These resources include hitpoints, abilities, and spells. The players' objective is to complete each encounter in a manner that mitigates the resource drain to a minimum. This creates gameplay and strategy and decision making.
Long term resources reinforce the idea of adventure. It creates the conflict of trying to make your long term resources last to the end of the adventure. This creates varying levels of tension and keeps encounters from getting monotonous. The same encounter can force players to approach it very differently depending on the availability of their resources.
Hit points function as the primary long term resource in D&D because it does not completely replenish each day and starting an encounter with fewer hit points increases the chance of death. The entire game's pacing hinges on this resource. In most editions of D&D, replenishing enough hit points to keep your character healthy costs either short term resources best saved for emergencies (healing spells) or another long term resource (money).
However, no edition of D&D I played handle hit points as a resource as effectively as it should. Healing that is too scarce can slow an adventure to an agonizing pace or halt it entirely, which is what CLW was designed to fix. However, CLW trivializes healing into a consumable that's extremely easy to stockpile. Like you said, this results in out-of-combat healing feeling like a pointless gold drain. 4th Edition tried to fix this problem with healing surges, free healing that replenishes daily. However, in doing so, they intentionally threw the baby out with the bathwater in order to focus 4th Edition as a skirmish game than a game about journey and adventure. It eliminated healing as a long term resource. 5th Edition inherited this mechanic, though tried to mitigate somewhat by requiring you to rest for 1 hour to heal and making you only replenish half your hit dice daily.
In summary, I strongly prefer a game that has a middle ground concerning scarcity of healing/hitpoints. I don't want a game with healing so scarce that a single bad luck encounter can bring the game to a halt. At the same time, I don't want a game that trivializes hit points as a long term resource. It reinforces D&D/PF as a skirmish game rather than a game about adventuring. To put it simply, I believe mechanics like healing surges and 5e hit dice do not solve the problem CLW creates in the game as I perceive it. Rather, it internalizes it into a new form.
Let me elaborate on that, but I'll start off by saying that I'm NOT totally happy with how any modern edition of D&D handles hitpoints/healing as a resource.
From a design perspective, the entire game revolves around the concept of using encounters as a resource drain - each CR = APL encounter is mathematically designed to consume roughly 20% to 25% of your daily resources. These resources include hitpoints, abilities, and spells. The players' objective is to complete each encounter in a manner that mitigates the resource drain to a minimum. This creates gameplay and strategy and decision making.
Long term resources reinforce the idea of adventure. It creates the conflict of trying to make your long term resources last to the end of the adventure. This creates varying levels of tension and keeps encounters from getting monotonous. The same encounter can force players to approach it very differently depending on the availability of their resources.
Hit points function as the primary long term resource in D&D...
Good post
At first glance, it looks like 5th edition is a bit more malleable than 3e or even 4e (and in this regards comes closer to 1e or 2e AD&D). This means you may houserule hit points as a resource pool that rejuvenates at a pace that you like, without skewing the game much.
The DMG has variant healing and resting rules, so you may even find a satisfying balance within the core rule.
I just don't understand why you'd make hitpoints your long term resource, when gold (in the form of offensive consumables, rituals, etc.) is a lot more versatile, exciting, and just works better.
Once you run out of healing/hitpoints you can't do anything and have effectively lost, but if you run out of consumable power boosts (but have easy health replenishment) you just imncreased the difficulty for the remainder of the adventure, without making it a lose-state.
Because adventuring is dangerous and combat functions as a major pillar of gameplay. It makes sense to use hit points as the main resource pool.
Gold does play a role. That's the purpose of healing items. Healing items allow you to replenish your hit points at the cost of another long term resource (wealth). However, CLW wands make this conversion so trivial and easy to pool that buying them feels more like a chore than stocking up for an adventure.
For my preference, it should be possible to lose an adventure. It may not involve dying. Maybe the party has to give up their quest, go home, and rethink their strategy. Maybe the PCs lose because the cost of victory was great. Maybe the villain wins. A great story can come from a villain making small victories to escalate the plot. In non-interactive narratives, the heroes typically have many defeats before finally reaching victory. I don't think losing should happen regularly, but it should be possible. As long as the story moves on.
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For those not familiar with 5e's healing, it works like this: At each level you gain a hit die associated with your class. After taking an hour rest you may spend any number of these hit die and regain the number of hit points that you roll. After an 8 hour rest you regain half your total hit die and all of your hit points.
Can you give an example of this? I don't understand it.
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For those not familiar with 5e's healing, it works like this: At each level you gain a hit die associated with your class. After taking an hour rest you may spend any number of these hit die and regain the number of hit points that you roll. After an 8 hour rest you regain half your total hit die and all of your hit points.Can you give an example of this? I don't understand it.
Basically we'll take a Fighter. A Fighter gains a D10 hit die every level. So if you're a level 7 Fighter, you are sitting on 7 D10s.
If you take a short rest (1 hour) you may spend X of your dice. So if I want to I can spend 3 of those 7 D10s, roll them and heal that much. You now only have 4 remaining to use. Every day (after a full sleep) you gain back half of what your maximum is.
I like it as it allows those quiet moments where you can sit, do a bit of reading, fireside chat, pray to your god, commune with your patron, etc.
Why would you make something that fluctuates a lot during "a major pillar of gameplay" into your main resource pool, that's supposed to be whittled down?
You raise good questions. Short answer: It's more exciting that way. It makes combat feel more dynamic and lethal if there's a smaller threshold on how much damage you can take before you go unconscious or die.
Why do you need 2 long term resource pools if gold is also a resource pool? Why isn't gold enough?
Having two connected resource pools with different properties and behavior adds depth to the game. It allows hit points and wealth to have different interactions. Your hit points have a capacity whereas your wealth does not. You can be robbed of your wealth. Your stats influence your hit points, but it would make little sense why it would your wealth. Spending money to maintain your also health makes sense from a roleplay perspective. This relate-able nature is what makes gold and health an enduring tradition throughout RPGs.
Why do you think making the gold->HP conversion more bothersome is adding more depth? Why is buying 50 potions instead of a wand feeling more like adventure?
Shifting the paradigm to potions essentially creates a soft limit on how much consumable healing items the party can carry. It makes preparation more important and require more attention. This reflects the concern for space and encumbrance ubiquitous to adventure preparation. The journey between supply points becomes riskier. It creates more meaningful decision points concerning what to carry and whether it's worth to stock a few quality potions over stocking many weak potions. Wands don't really have any of this because they take up almost no space for the amount of healing they provide.
Traditionally, many games worked this way, too. Even video games.
I agree that adventures should be fail-able, I just don't agree "lack of healing" should be one such condition.
Planning and preparation is a major aspect of D&D and many other games. I see lack of preparation and failing to play smart enough to not burn through resources as valid lose conditions. Keep in mind that the major reason for this system is forcing players to switch up their approach depending on the scarcity of their resources. If they aren't
I've played Pathfinder since it came out in 2009. In that entire time I've always played with wands of cure light wounds. Even after moving to the opposite side of the country I see people annoyed if you don't turn up to a PFS game with a wand on you(no matter if you have 0 XP). It seems like the idea of starting every fight at max HP is fairly firmly entrenched which is amusing as I know healing surges was a problem for many.
I've been playing 5e since it came out and I've seen people who are more than happy to start combats at less than full HP. I've also seen clerics be judicious in their use of spells so they have enough to heal the party.
For those not familiar with 5e's healing, it works like this: At each level you gain a hit die associated with your class. After taking an hour rest you may spend any number of these hit die and regain the number of hit points that you roll. After an 8 hour rest you regain half your total hit die and all of your hit points.
(I've accidentally houseruled this to be you get back all the hit die after an 8 hour rest).
I'm wondering what sort of effect introducing this to Pathfinder would have? I know contrary to my own experiences not everyone uses wands of CLW in their games, but have we reached a stage where the AP's largely assume you use them?
It seems like clerics/oracles would get bumped down a couple of pegs as they wouldn't be able to devote all of their spells to buffing. Although from experience most of them still could be. However surely days would inevitably become a bit shorter which makes full casters like the wizard tend to shine while fighters lag behind in effectiveness.
What do people think? Has anyone considered it?
No they cost 2 prestige and and will last through level 11 in PFS more often then not. It's basic survival gear for an adventurer like a weapon or rope. That's why people get upset when you don't bring one, because that's what an incompetent adventurer would do.
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For those not familiar with 5e's healing, it works like this: At each level you gain a hit die associated with your class. After taking an hour rest you may spend any number of these hit die and regain the number of hit points that you roll. After an 8 hour rest you regain half your total hit die and all of your hit points.Can you give an example of this? I don't understand it.
Bob the fighter 2/Rogue 1 has 26 hit points maximum. After 3 fights him and the rest of the party are down on hit points with him being at only 11. They take an hour long rest and now Bob can spend up to 3 hit dice (he has 2d10 from fighter and 1d8 from rogue). He spends a fighter hit die (1d10) and lucks out and rolls a 10. He now has 21 hit points. He'd like to be at full so he decides to spend his rogue hit die (1d8) but only rolls a 2 so now he's at 23 hit points. He decides not to spend his last remaining hit die and at a later point that day he can now take another hour long rest and spend his last remaining hit die. Once he does that he'll have to wait until tomorrow when he regains all of his hit die.
No they cost 2 prestige and and will last through level 11 in PFS more often then not.
This is completely off-topic but it does reinforce that wands of CLW have certainly become ingrained in PFS if not the core rules themselves.
I just don't understand why you'd make hitpoints your long term resource, when gold (in the form of offensive consumables, rituals, etc.) is a lot more versatile, exciting, and just works better.
Once you run out of healing/hitpoints you can't do anything and have effectively lost, but if you run out of consumable power boosts (but have easy health replenishment) you just imncreased the difficulty for the remainder of the adventure, without making it a lose-state.
yes you can buy healing stuff with Gold, but depending on many factors, that might mean you end up with way less Gold to purchase other things.
No they cost 2 prestige and and will last through level 11 in PFS more often then not.This is completely off-topic but it does reinforce that wands of CLW have certainly become ingrained in PFS if not the core rules themselves.
The idea that this is more of a PFS thing matches my experiences. In my last home game campaign I gave the players a CLW wand as random loot. They saw it as only slightly useful. Since starting a new campaign with the same players, they haven't expressed any interest in getting one again.
I don't consider solving this to be a necessity, but the two solutions I've seen that appeal the most to me are:
- Reserve Points - similar to others mentioned, you heal back in short rests (1hp/minute) from a pool equal to your total hp. That pool replenishes identically to regular HP, when you are already at full hp. So if you're "overhealed" it goes to the Reserve points (unless those are full).
- Set minimum caster level of potions to 3rd, and wands to 5th. Adds a lot more flavor to those items in general, and semi-solves the easy healing issue.
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The Injury/Strain system also has a "rub some gold on it" variant, where you can heal 1hp per 3gp (based on CLW wand pricing) during a rest period.
Essentially makes the CLW Wand a part of the system without requiring an actual healstick.I think you could easily implement 5e's healing system in PF though. I don't expect any problems to come of it.
In as much as I have the authority to say so, and I think I do, "Rub Some Gold on It Sub-Variant" is now the official term.
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A few people have mentioned "Strain/Injury", which isn't really a separate pool of HP but just a change to the healing rate of some damage, but keeping a single pool of HP.
Rainzax's post is a little different from my method (but no less valid). At my table it works like this:
All damage heals after a short rest (≈2 min) if it didn't come from a crit, a failed save, or a hit that put you below zero. ("Strain")
All other damage ("Injury") must be healed with magic or the Treat Deadly Wounds application of the heal skill.
This keeps the combat balance exactly the same, but obviates the need for the cure wand after every encounter. It also irons out some of the conceptual issues with the abstraction of hit points; if you're interested in that, there's more covered in the link from Rainzax.
I haven't noticed any appreciable difference in gameplay from the RAW, except now we do a lot less cure paperwork.
It's even still possible to run a session with prolonged attrition if that's your bag -- just focus on things like direct damage spells and crit-fishing attacks, etc.
In the RAW, players do everything they can to stay at max HP, and they'd be stupid not to. Since it really doesn't cost much to do this, most of the effort is in collecting money from the players to buy a cure wand, and rolling dice to see how many charges it takes. BORING. Just let them heal automatically unless the attack was really nasty.
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The core issue here is this:
The game is, at it's core, about managing attrition.
The point is not, "Can I pass this encounter?" it is, "Can I conserve enough resources while passing this encounter so that I can pass X more encounters?"
People that are addicted to Wands of CLW, the 15 minute workday, alternate systems like the Strain/Injury thing, the way people are focused on making every encounter individually challenging--these are all ways the gaming public is basically say, "No, we don't want that."
But, no matter how obvious it is that most people don't want attrition based game play, it remains the focus.
Seriously, everything is attrition. Ability damage, ability drain, negative levels, curses, all that stuff just requires spell slots/money to remove. Even death is actually just attrition, because it ultimately takes your money and time getting a rez, not your actual character's life.
People use Wands of CLW and work for 15 minutes a day because they don't want to play a game of attrition (even though they totally still are, because they're basically rubbing gold on it, as was said above), they want to enter each fight at full, and have each fight to be individually challenging--this is what they expect because that is how modern media (video games, notably) work. You never enter a fight in WoW Instance, or even just in Dragon Age or whatever with less than full health. Why would you? And the game doesn't expect you too--it's all tuned for you to have full health all the time.
But D&D isn't, and never has been. I don't know what direction you want to take this: 1) Why hasn't D&D updated to the preferred model? or 2) Why don't people realize this and just lt D&D to work the way it's designed?
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the game, at it's core, is a storytelling game.
to what extent my players exercise a form of 'cultural resistance' by showing up to a fight having taken whatever means possible to maximize their resources is, to me, besides the point.
As DM, I saw that a simple rules change (Injury/Strain) alters the story of that scenario away from a 'cure magic addiction' or 'series of 15-minute jaunts' and instead turns it into something more heroic.
the game, at it's core, is a storytelling game.
I would disagree, but story games are a topic of a totally different sort of thread.
to what extent my players exercise a form of 'cultural resistance' by showing up to a fight having taken whatever means possible to maximize their resources is, to me, besides the point.
No, see, that's entirely the point. They are resisting the idea that the game is attrition-based. They are saying, "no, thanks, I want to be be at full resources here."
As DM, I saw that a simple rules change (Injury/Strain) alters the story of that scenario away from a 'cure magic addiction' or 'series of 15-minute jaunts' and instead turns it into something more heroic.
Only because you also find a game that is not attrition-based to be more heroic than one that is.
What if we twisted it, though, so that the attrition based version was obviously more heroic than the altered one:
Imagine a video game RPG where the final sequence is a series of boss fights with no breaks in between them. It was designed such that no individual fight is especially deadly, but all of them in a row are because you have no chance to rest and get back your health, mana, or long cooldown abilities. In short, the entire challenge is the fact that it's a rapid gauntlet.
So, this game hits the market, but instead of actually trying to play through the gauntlet, people start coming up with clever ways to bypass it. One subset of players realizes that, while they can only carry 5 potions at a time, they can go to the battleground sometime in Act 2 and drop potions around it, so that at the end of Act 3, it's full of potions for healing, mana, and cooldown restoration.
Another subset figures out a spot where the bosses get stuck on the geography of the arena. If you lead them to this one specific spot and run away in a specific fashion, you can get out of reach of all its attacks and meditate during the fight to regain all your resources.
A third subset figures out a glitch in the ability system, and taking a certain set of abilities gives you constant regeneration, so they adopt the strategy of beating the boss down so that a single hit will kill them, then running in circles away while your health and mana refill and your cooldowns return, because the final stage of the fights when the bosses enrage dictates its behavior to only charge over and over.
Is it really more heroic to edit in rest points between these bosses? No, there's nothing more innately heroic or unheroic about any particular tactic. It just comes down to a game about attrition and an audience that doesn't want it to be about attrition, but doesn't realize that's the issue.
Bob the fighter 2/Rogue 1 has 26 hit points maximum. After 3 fights him and the rest of the party are down on hit points with him being at only 11. They take an hour long rest and now Bob can spend up to 3 hit dice (he has 2d10 from fighter and 1d8 from rogue). He spends a fighter hit die (1d10) and lucks out and rolls a 10. He now has 21 hit points. He'd like to be at full so he decides to spend his rogue hit die (1d8) but only rolls a 2 so now he's at 23 hit points. He decides not to spend his last remaining hit die and at a later point that day he can now take another hour long rest and spend his last remaining hit die. Once he does that he'll have to wait until tomorrow when he regains all of his hit die.
Don't forget, you also get to add your CON modifier to each Hitdice roll when healing this way. :)
As long as there are hps, it remains an attrition game. You can change the scope of it by going micro (erosion of hps during one single combat) to macro (erosion of hps over a whole adventure) and everything in between, but it doesn't make it a non-attrition game.
Newer editions play different from the original; I don't think it should surprise anyone. In fact, D&D has updated its hp/healing model in 4th and 5th edition, and in 3rd edition there was plenty of ways to "cheat" away from going into combat with low hps (wands of CLW was one).
Not only that, but the way encounters are designed by the industry nowadays assumes that adventurers come into combat with decent resource. So the old school paradigm has been broken for a while now.
Starting most combats at full hit points is fine. However, I have issue with CLW/healing surges/hit die trivializing the resources necessary to achieve that. Trivializing them undermines the feeling of adventure because the PCs become less dependent on resupplying, which removes the long term attrition. Healing surges and hit die, in particular, reinforce what I call the "one-day adventure." It removes the long attrition one expects from a multi-day journey by having everything replenish at the start of each day.
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mplindustries, I'm gonna take you up in detail here -- I'm not intending to simply contradict you, but to seize upon an interesting discussion. Here goes!
The core issue here is this:
The game is, at it's core, about managing attrition.
Is it? Why do you say this?
I often say the game is about power fantasy, and has become increasingly so over the various editions.
Certainly there are legacy rules from when D&D was really about logistics and expeditions. But actual gameplay hasn't been that way for some time.
When attempting to answer the question "What is Pathfinder about", the place I look is the adventure paths, since they provide rich context and an insight into the publisher's intentions. That may not be how the game got here, but it may be more important to think "why is this game being published?"
So taking the adventure paths, for example, do you still think the game is about managing attrition?
Seriously, everything is attrition. Ability damage, ability drain, negative levels, curses, all that stuff just requires spell slots/money to remove. Even death is actually just attrition, because it ultimately takes your money and time getting a rez, not your actual character's life.
We're talking about Hit Points, and to some extent acknowledging the interaction with GP. The other factors you mention here are actually quite well balanced for attrition, even if your party has mastered CLWs or uses Strain rules.
Let's focus on hit points, for the sake of clarifying the conversation. If you include all that other stuff, your argument is unimpeachable, but hit points would still fail to perform this role.
The point is not, "Can I pass this encounter?" it is, "Can I conserve enough resources while passing this encounter so that I can pass X more encounters?"
People that are addicted to Wands of CLW, the 15 minute workday, alternate systems like the Strain/Injury thing, the way people are focused on making every encounter individually challenging--these are all ways the gaming public is basically say, "No, we don't want that."
But, no matter how obvious it is that most people don't want attrition based game play, it remains the focus.
People use Wands of CLW and work for 15 minutes a day because they don't want to play a game of attrition (even though they totally still are, because they're basically rubbing gold on it, as was said above), they want to enter each fight at full, and have each fight to be individually challenging--this is what they expect because that is how modern media (video games, notably) work. You never enter a fight in WoW Instance, or even just in Dragon Age or whatever with less than full health. Why would you? And the game doesn't expect you too--it's all tuned for you to have full health all the time.
But D&D isn't, and never has been. I don't know what direction you want to take this: 1) Why hasn't D&D updated to the preferred model? or 2) Why don't people realize this and just lt D&D to work the way it's designed?
Hit Point attrition is a part of the game, true. But unless the GM makes things deliberately difficult, it is a VERY easy part of the game to master. And once mastered, it brings little to the session beyond annoyance and paperwork.
I have wracked my brain to find ways to get HP to behave in the way you're arguing it should work. But honestly, the feature is simply not working the way it used to. Even in the absence of a determined party buying optimal resources, healing is simply too abundant for HP loss to be anything other than a post-encounter speed bump.
Let's put it this way -- even if the GM somehow makes you run out of healing, and you're at half or a quarter strength, you're not going to soldier on. That's foolish. It's as close to "playing the game wrong" as I am comfortable defining. You're statistically unlikely to win, which means you're not actually role-playing (unless your character is stupidly brave). Sure, some small percentage of such attempts will bear out as glorious, improbable victories, but think of the mountains of dead PCs who must be sacrificed upon that altar to achieve that glory for the minority.
That's not actually good game design. (Not a comment directed at any specific designer, since it's a legacy rule we're talking about. It was simply never re-designed when it should have been, because it worked well enough in most cases until it was too late.)
The fact is, I agree with your assessment about attrition, but the RAW doesn't actually accomplish this anymore. Something about the currency cycle of HP is out of whack.
I think the tendency of new editions and house rule designers to tackle this issue is a natural expression of the fact that people don't play with attrition in the way they used to. If a system is not properly calibrated to elicit conservative behavior, then it just won't work. HP aren't designed well for this. Other damage systems (negative levels, energy drain, etc) are actually far better. House rules or not, if you're a GM interested in the attrition feel, these are much better tools to use. May I recommend vampires?
What if we twisted it, though, so that the attrition based version was obviously more heroic than the altered one:
Imagine a video game RPG where the final sequence is a series of boss fights with no breaks in between them. It was designed such that no individual fight is especially deadly, but all of them in a row are because you have no chance to rest and get back your health, mana, or long cooldown abilities. In short, the entire challenge is the fact that it's a rapid gauntlet.
So, this game hits the market, but instead of actually trying to play through the gauntlet, people start coming up with clever ways to bypass it. One subset of players realizes that, while they can only carry 5 potions at a time, they can go to the battleground sometime in Act 2 and drop potions around it, so that at the end of Act 3, it's full of potions for healing, mana, and cooldown restoration.
Another subset figures out a spot where the bosses get stuck on the geography of the arena. If you lead them to this one specific spot and run away in a specific fashion, you can get out of reach of all its attacks and meditate during the fight to regain all your resources.
A third subset figures out a glitch in the ability system, and taking a certain set of abilities gives you constant regeneration, so they adopt the strategy of beating the boss down so that a single hit will kill them, then running in circles away while your health and mana refill and your cooldowns return, because the final stage of the fights when the bosses enrage dictates its behavior to only charge over and over.
Is it really more heroic to edit in rest points between these bosses? No, there's nothing more innately heroic or unheroic about any particular tactic. It just comes down to a game about attrition and an audience that doesn't want it to be about attrition, but doesn't realize that's the issue.
I see what you're getting at here, but this is not a video game. It really is no basis for comparison.
Tabletop Role-playing games purport to give the players meaningful decision-making power in a way that video games cannot achieve.
Reduced to absurdity, we might as well be presenting a scenario called "Don't drink this vial of poison". You're telling me that an informed player will sometimes choose to drink the poison, even knowing their character will die.
Since healing is available, and escape is often possible, expecting a character to soldier on with low HP is tantamount to "drinking the poison".
People who are actually roleplaying their characters will not behave like this -- not unless you introduce an externality like a timer or other consequence for NOT soldiering on. That's when the absurd scenario morphs into "Drink this poison to save the world and MAYBE live!", which is a totally valid approach.
This is not an instance of "those rascally players are gaming the system so they always have max HP". This is a basic failure of Hit Points as a mechanic to exploit human psychology.
Choosing a sub-optimal strategy is not roleplaying. Just because the mechanics assume that people behave in this inexplicable manner does not mean that people should. And I would never fault a player, or assume some kind of cheese, just because they want to live. That's sort of the object of the game.
If you really want characters to push on while running low on resources (both hps and powers), that's a matter for in character motivation. If they know bad things will happen if the party doesn't stop the BBEG without taking time to rest, then they'll have to push on - or accept failure. Doing that well as a GM means you have to judge what they're capable of. Don't use their motivations to lure them into fights they can't win.
Yes, let's take stock of the fact that even the abstract ideal of HP attrition is actually not all that desirable from the GM's perspective.
It's easy to balance encounters against full HP. If you don't even know what the players will be at when they hit the encounter, then all bets are off.
I just don't enjoy that lack of control. It could result in an encounter being way too easy or way to hard depending on how things shake out.
Getting the players to play conservatively is just not that great a payoff, in my opinion. Unless attrition is the theme of the day (which I do sometimes use), fast-paced play without a bunch of resting and healing spells is vastly preferable.
@LoneKnave: Was that sarcasm?
Plenty of designers write adventures for "the new normal" -- including the adventure paths more often than not.
So any rule that forced a regression to the old standard would make those encounters impossibly hard.
@TheJeff: Fair enough -- but I still find the procedure of replenishing HP between scenes to be more obnoxious than the periodic rest and preparation of spells. One of them feels like meaningful decision making, and the other seems like crunching randomized numbers in order to determine the GP cost at two steps remove.
This is a good discussion. I think this calls for experimentation. If I can finish my work for the day, I'll see if I can create a few machination diagrams and run some tests. I use machination diagrams to study game mechanics and refine the mechanics of my own creations.
Healing surges and hit die, in particular, reinforce what I call the "one-day adventure." It removes the long attrition one expects from a multi-day journey by having everything replenish at the start of each day.Everything, except other consumables, rituals, whatever gear got broken/henchmen killed/mounts perished, rations... You know, all that unimportant stuff. But HP gets recovered, so I guess you can just adventure-a-day.
As I mentioned earlier, healing should be the big resource because combat serves as a major pillar of the game. It's also a consistently needed resource that requires regular attention, unlike henchmen, mounts, and rations (which are cheap, easy to store, and do not risk spoiling).
Healing surges and hit die, in particular, reinforce what I call the "one-day adventure." It removes the long attrition one expects from a multi-day journey by having everything replenish at the start of each day.What we're seeing is probably a decline in "multi-day journey" expectations. I know I find the idea of them at least a little tedious and prefer the action happen over a short, possibly even rushed, span of space and time.
Like mplindustries says, I feel like some players are growing accustomed to an adventure lacking long term resources. However, I believe many players do not like this paradigm. The ubiquitous nature of CLW wands spurs many complaints, many of them involving how CLW eliminates attrition.
My point is: we can have it both ways. We can compromise. The current systems aren't balanced. Without CLW/surges, out-of-combat healing is too scarce. With CLW/surges, it's too plentiful. We can design a system that finds the right balance. This could be as simple as changing the healing items themselves.
mplindustries, I'm gonna take you up in detail here -- I'm not intending to simply contradict you, but to seize upon an interesting discussion. Here goes!
The core issue here is this:
The game is, at it's core, about managing attrition.
Is it? Why do you say this?
I often say the game is about power fantasy, and has become increasingly so over the various editions.
mplindustries is referring to the game mechanics. Under the hood, the game works by attrition. I explained this in detail earlier in the thread.
The game is about many things, but adventure is one that endures. It's one worth supporting. We can have the game be about many things at once as long as the game supports them in a way that do not render them mutually exclusive. Unfortunately, CLW/healing surges do a terrible job of this.