Healing surges and other such fail.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Fri Jan 09, 2009 4:47 am

virgileso wrote:It is a cooperative story-telling game, and very few people I know of ever want to tell a story where there is no such thing as attrition, or at the very least the illusion of attrition.

People may want the illusion of attrition, but trust me, they don't actually want it.

D&D is a game about probability, not about moral triumph. The game doesn't suddenly start going in your favor because the pure-hearted princess will die if you DON'T win the next combat!

In fact, since climax fights are usually saved for the end of adventures it becomes downright fucking insulting and depressing that you're more likely to fail horribly when it really counts.

Man, fuck that. The princess already might die if you don't beat the baddy fast enough. This isn't some meaningless 'winkwinknudge' effect you see in movies and literature. This is literally true and you and your friends might get sent home after not failing the campaign but tearing up your character sheets.

I don't see the problem here. Is that not enough tension for you? Have we become so jaded that complete and eternal failure does not create enough excitement? Damn, you guys are nihilistic.

What if 'healing surges' were a sort of special move, or even moves that allowed you to ignore wound penalties for a time? It would be one of those limited moves, likely an encounter power or equivalent.

Then you'd have the problem of it either being a slap on the wrist or the same dumbass system I'm complaining about, you're just fiddling with the numbers.

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Fri Jan 09, 2009 4:56 am

Resource management, I'd say. You don't need to be at "full power" to beat the boss. I'm somewhat reminded of epic fail from ArcTan--he wants a game where there's no chance of characters dying (just the illusion thereof) because character death isn't fun.

Elennsar · Post by **Elennsar** » Fri Jan 09, 2009 4:58 am

OR you can just take a break until your protagonists are at full health again.

And play Sir Robert the Kinda Cowardly, who never takes a risk he can avoid, ever. About as fun as playing a dice bag. Maybe less.

Seriously, what part of 'the game doesn't fucking give you plot armor' do you not understand? What, exactly, is heroic about dying in the courtyard to a hail of arrows because you were too goddamn stupid to let your leg heal after being mauled by the gate guard?

It is heroic to be brave and to take chances. It is not heroic to sit back and avoid doing anything that could possibly get you hurt because you're afraid that you'll lose if you're not at top form and then some.

So fuck plot armor. Plot armor makes as big a joke out of the idea of "actually being heroic" as any other method of "cannot be meaningfully hurt".

D&D is a game about probability, not about moral triumph. The game doesn't suddenly start going in your favor because the pure-hearted princess will die if you DON'T win the next combat!

Nor should it, unless you want some system where you are better off fighting with a "broken arm" condition than without it.

In fact, since climax fights are usually saved for the end of adventures it becomes downright fucking insulting and depressing that you're more likely to fail horribly when it really counts.

Man, fuck that. The princess already might die if you don't beat the baddy fast enough. This isn't some meaningless 'winkwinknudge' effect you see in movies and literature. This is literally true and you and your friends might get sent home after not failing the campaign but tearing up your character sheets.

I don't see the problem here. Is that not enough tension for you? Have we become so jaded that complete and eternal failure does not create enough excitement? Damn, you guys are nihilistic.

No, we just want an actual possibility of actual failure because of actual events, instead of being invulnerable to anything short of the climax, because there is no goddamn tension and drama or point to fighting the guards in a set up where the only thing that matters is getting to the baddy and winning.

The problem is that unless you are hurt and are struggling, your triumphs mean nothing because you won because it was impossible to lose.

Then you'd have the problem of it either being a slap on the wrist or the same dumbass system I'm complaining about, you're just fiddling with the numbers.

Lago, what you want can easily be done by making it so you're at full health except during a fight in which you might get injuried. No, wait, because if you get injuried you'd have penalties big enough that they'd matter (since you don't want a "slap on the wrist") and you might lose that fight.

You cannot have "heroes are actually in danger at any point, ever" without that risking defeat and possibly even death.

What the fuck do you want? Heroes who never lose, never get hurt, never die, never are in peril? [/b]

Talisman · Post by **Talisman** » Fri Jan 09, 2009 4:58 am

Lago (my bold) wrote:So unlike the movies, where Inigo Montoya or Ichigo or Spiderman suddenly finds a reserve of strength after being beaten down and saves the day, there isn't any reversal of your fortunes. You suck and you'll only suck harder. Your only options is for you to take a rest, the DM to dumb down future encounters, or let the encounters stand as they are and take a potentially game-ending risk.

So we institute some kind of "You killed my father!" recharge mechanic. It needs to be short-term; say, 2-5 rounds; and it needs to be useable only 1-2/day. Thus, you can have the heroes get beat to crap, but when it counts - at the climactic final battle - they can push through the pain and ignore their injuries for a few seconds.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:OR you can just take a break until your protagonists are at full health again.

Seriously, what part of 'the game doesn't fucking give you plot armor' do you not understand? What, exactly, is heroic about dying in the courtyard to a hail of arrows because you were too goddamn stupid to let your leg heal after being mauled by the gate guard?

"The princess will be sacrificed in three hours unless we save her."

"Too bad for her; I'm at 40% health. Maybe she'll live until tomorrow; then we can mosey in and rescue her."

This is crap. I don't want to play that game. I want to play the game where the response is, "Let me wipe the blood from my eyes and let's go!"

If there's no real risk, there's no tension. If there's no risk to the "heroes," their actions - no matter how benevolent - aren't heroic in any real sense. Sniping a Colossal ooze to death before it can eat a town is good, but it's no more heroic than shooting down geese from a blind because there's no element of danger.

I would also suggest some kind of "carrot"": that is, a mechanical reward for pressing on in the face of adversity. 4e tries this a wee little bit with the action point mechanic - you gain an action point for every 2 encounters you beat without resting. Assuming the system worked and action points were work accumulating, something like this makes sense.

Edit: Fixed m'tags.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Fri Jan 09, 2009 5:37 am

Talisman wrote:"The princess will be sacrificed in three hours unless we save her."

"Too bad for her; I'm at 40% health. Maybe she'll live until tomorrow; then we can mosey in and rescue her."

This is crap. I don't want to play that game. I want to play the game where the response is, "Let me wipe the blood from my eyes and let's go!"

And then you die horribly, because tabletop games don't work like the movies. You don't even get to make a heroic sacrifice, because wiping the blood from your eyes and going not only doesn't just make your suck goes away, it just makes you suck even harder. The princess gets to see you die like dogs and she gets sacrificed anyway.

That's a great outcome, isn't it? What a fucking waste of time that was.

If there's no real risk, there's no tension. If there's no risk to the "heroes," their actions - no matter how benevolent - aren't heroic in any real sense. Sniping a Colossal ooze to death before it can eat a town is good, but it's no more [/i]heroic[/i] than shooting down geese from a blind because there's no element of danger.

What, is regular combat not tense enough for you? You already have a chance to die even if you're at perfect health. If you want to up the risk then make the final challenges more challenging.

Don't fuck over players using something as arbitrary as how lucky they were in the previous encounters.

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Fri Jan 09, 2009 5:52 am

What makes it a requirement for the final boss to be such a giant in comparison to all of its minions? And if you're going in at perfect health every fight, and you represent a risk to the party by making the final challenge more challenging, then that's the same damn thing as not making it quite as big and then having the party actually have wounds carry over.

RandomCasualty2 · Post by **RandomCasualty2** » Fri Jan 09, 2009 6:01 am

4E had the idea of milestones kind of right. The more battles you fight in a day, you should get some kind of benefit to replace the resources you lost. Now you may be wounded in some way, but keeping up a constant momentum should get your heroes going, such that you've got some extra resources to spend that you may not have had otherwise if you'd just teleported to the villain's chamber.

In a game based around heroics, doing heroic things should give you benefits, and getting points after every few battles that you can spend to get that surge of power against the boss is damn useful.

Elennsar · Post by **Elennsar** » Fri Jan 09, 2009 6:06 am

That's a great outcome, isn't it? What a fucking waste of time that was.

Yes, because anything where you stand a chance of losing greater than X, where X is a number greater than 0, is a waste of time.

Wait, what?

I'm not sure if I have Talisman's exact thought/s here, but I'm pretty sure that the idea is that you try, you do your best, and if you fail, then you gave it all you could and that's what heroes do.

Something where you are not at risk, ever, is not heroic, it is not brave, it is not dramatic, it is at best boring.

What, is regular combat not tense enough for you? You already have a chance to die even if you're at perfect health. If you want to up the risk then make the final challenges more challenging.

Yes, a chance so small it isn't even funny, because people like you bitch even more if something short of the final encounter had a real chance of killing you.

You just plain don't want to have your characters at risk of "game over". At all.

What makes it a requirement for the final boss to be such a giant in comparison to all of its minions?

Presumably, because the big boss is supposed to be a tougher fight than the minions were and scariest and nastier and well he's the big boss for some reason.

Other than that, I'm not sure.

I get the feeling here, and I could be wrong, that Talisman and I want heroes to be doing real life kind of heroism (where there are no reloads and no quick method to healing)...whether with larger than life characters or not, that kind of "when the going gets tough, the tough keep going." Sometimes you triumph against the odds and sometimes we just have a stone reading:

Stranger! To Sparta say, her faithful band,
Here lie in death, remembering her command.

And Lago, by contrast, wants to have his characters never, ever, sucking or being forced to take risks to save the day because its a "waste of time" to not win. An "honorable defeat" is a contradiction in terms.

In a game based around heroics, doing heroic things should give you benefits, and getting points after every few battles that you can spend to get that surge of power against the boss is damn useful.

I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, yes, it should be a good idea to do heroic things in a heroic game. On the other hand, heroes do heroic things because that's what heroes do.

Rewarding people for playing in genre doesn't feel right to me. If you really want to play a given genre, you shouldn't need to be given bennies for actually doing it.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Fri Jan 09, 2009 6:27 am

virgileso wrote:What makes it a requirement for the final boss to be such a giant in comparison to all of its minions? And if you're going in at perfect health every fight, and you represent a risk to the party by making the final challenge more challenging, then that's the same damn thing as not making it quite as big and then having the party actually have wounds carry over.

That's because you're getting the cart and the horse mixed up.

Encounters should average out to a challenge level the game should support and the DM should adjust this as necessary.

The problem is that this system, in order to have a fair challenge from a metagame perspective, ends up making the enemies of future encounters easier.

And yes, the final boss should pretty much be the biggest challenge of the encounter. The climax should not come in the second or third act of a five-act play; that's just basic storytelling.

The alternative towards getting one or the other would be what Elennar is doing and just saying that only REAL ROLEPLAYERS don't game the system even when the cards are stacked against them.

RC2: The problem with that is that you're still assigning essentially a random penalty, because the amount of woundage you receive is random. Even if you give players action points or momentum points or whatever for pressing on, the penalty you take in the first or second act is random and the reward is not. So you still have the same essential problem, only lessened.

Elennsar · Post by **Elennsar** » Fri Jan 09, 2009 6:36 am

"Real roleplayers" has nothing to do with it. Either you're playing a character who will risk his or her life and are actually willing to have that not just be bullcrap that isn't actually true in the system, or you don't want to play that kind of character and don't want to truly take heroic risks.

If you don't want to take heroic risks, then don't bitch about not having us consider you to do anything requiring actual IC courage, however. Because you're not.

So, nothing shatters in the system if you wait until morning. Its just that in a "now and never" situation, you picked "never". Because the villain will not wait for you to be fully rested and top form.

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Fri Jan 09, 2009 6:41 am

So here's an off-topic question: how should healing in 3e be made to suck less? Sinfire Titan suggested giving other spells healing effects (such as magic circle against evil healing HP for non-evil creatures).

Elennsar · Post by **Elennsar** » Fri Jan 09, 2009 6:44 am

Depends on what you want healing to do as "not suck".

But if nothing else, the amount of resources (of any sort) spent healing has to have some relationship to the amount of good it does...if being down 50% of your hit points sucks, being able to avoid falling below 50% is worth a lot more than if anywhere between 1 and full is as it is in D&D now.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Fri Jan 09, 2009 6:50 am

Lago, you'll notice that you are arguing alone, despite that everyone but Elennsar agrees with you.

This is because we've all had this argument with him before, because he really only has one argument which he makes every thread about.

Just ignore him, it apparently got him to leave BG, it's the only strategy that works, because he is contractually obligated to never change his mind and always ignore what you are actually saying.

Give up. Sometimes, being a hero hurts you and everyone around you, and leaving Princess Elennsar to her bitching will be a lot better in the long run for everyone.

Elennsar · Post by **Elennsar** » Fri Jan 09, 2009 6:52 am

Kaelik, you mind editing that to fit a few more mistakes and lies in there? There was the possibility of that post being taken seriously for a while.

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Fri Jan 09, 2009 7:08 am

I wasn't confused as to why the final boss needs to be bigger than his minions, I was confused as to why he needs to be baseline HUGE compared to his minions. For encounter progression, I don't see the need for continual escalation of challenges, you can have a tempo of challenge going up and down (and still have the climax at the end).

I already said players want at least the illusion of tension, yet you want even that veil ripped off. Some resource management works, and having difficulty scale based on prior encounter's luck is very unlikely to be that problematic/arbitrary because of the whole aggregate thing (making appreciable variation more unlikely than bad rolls in the last fight).

There is a connection I, and hopefully others, want with the character for greater enjoyment. Not having prior events mean anything puts the character in this form of stasis that distances awareness of the character, especially on the scale you're arguing for.

There is also the, I hate to use this word, verisimilitude. This basically means that characters can NEVER suffer anything more severe than a bruise or minor laceration, because otherwise we have broken bones resetting instantly, gaping holes resealing, poison flushing out of the system, etc.

On P_R's question, I've considered healing options in 3.X as the following...
* Buff to ability scores, but only enough to reduce penalties from ability damage from poison and others
* Transform lethal damage to nonlethal
* More temporary hit point spells as a buffer

EDIT: I'm not intending to be wholly against your view, Lago. I just want at least a nod towards the idea of prior events meaning something to maintain the illusion (especially if you keep in mind that full resources aren't required to beat the final boss, allowing wiggle room). Ideally, even more while allowing success.

Talisman · Post by **Talisman** » Fri Jan 09, 2009 7:26 am

Kaelik, we all know that you hate Elennsar because he...I dunno, slept with your wife, or ran over your dog, or something. But if you want him to go away, why aren't you ignoring him?

Also, I guess you didn't notice my posts...or RC's posts...or virgilso's posts...or P_R's post...etc.

Lago wrote:And then you die horribly, because tabletop games don't work like the movies. You don't even get to make a heroic sacrifice, because wiping the blood from your eyes and going not only doesn't just make your suck goes away, it just makes you suck even harder. The princess gets to see you die like dogs and she gets sacrificed anyway.

Well, this is a problem with the system, isn't it? What the hell kind of heroic adventure game doesn't allow you to make heroic, last-minute rescues?

Heroes fight through the damn pain and do what needs doing. Sometimes some of them die. If it was easy, everyone would do it.

Lago wrote:Don't fuck over players using something as arbitrary as how lucky they were in the previous encounters.

I'm also not going to reward players for being so cowardly that they refuse to take any risk of character death, or take on any challenging combat at less than 95% health.

Elennsar wrote:I'm not sure if I have Talisman's exact thought/s here, but I'm pretty sure that the idea is that you try, you do your best, and if you fail, then you gave it all you could and that's what heroes do.

Something where you are not at risk, ever, is not heroic, it is not brave, it is not dramatic, it is at best boring.

Pretty much. Sure, you'd prefer to be at optimum health and power, but sometimes that's not possible. Now, if the scenario has no time limit, fine...you rest up and go at it again. OTOH, if there's a time crunch - rescue the sacrifical maiden; take out the bridge before the orc army arrives; stop the Dread Lord from opening the gate - resting and recuperating means DEFEAT. This is the time when true heroes man up to the damn challenge and risk their lives to get it done. That's why we call 'em heroes.

I get the feeling here, and I could be wrong, that Talisman and I want heroes to be doing real life kind of heroism (where there are no reloads and no quick method to healing)...whether with larger than life characters or not, that kind of "when the going gets tough, the tough keep going." Sometimes you triumph against the odds and sometimes we just have a stone reading:

Stranger! To Sparta say, her faithful band,
Here lie in death, remembering her command.

Partially true. I don't object to a limited amount of reloads and quick healing; I object to there "we're low on resources; screw the adventure" mentality. It works okay for exploration; not so much for other scenarios.

In a game based around heroics, doing heroic things should give you benefits, and getting points after every few battles that you can spend to get that surge of power against the boss is damn useful.
I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, yes, it should be a good idea to do heroic things in a heroic game. On the other hand, heroes do heroic things because that's what heroes do.

Rewarding people for playing in genre doesn't feel right to me. If you really want to play a given genre, you shouldn't need to be given bennies for actually doing it.

I disagree. It's the old positive reinforcement routine: you reward the behavior you want to encourage. I reward heroic behavior in my game because I want to run games about heroes. Sure, my game crew is made of good roleplayers who would probably do this sort of thing anyway...but isn't it nice to get a tangible reward for doing the right (or cool) thing?

Keep in mind, any such rewards are purely metagame concepts...the characters don't even know they exist.

To answer P_R's question, I like the idea of a mechanic similar to the one Manxome described, where you automatically heal X amount of hp after every combat...say, 30% of your total.

I also like the idea of a nonmagical "second wind" mechanic that makes noncasters less reliant on the healbot. It could be useable a number of times per day equal to your Con mod + 1, and heal X amount as a swift action or Y amount as a full-round action.

Elennsar · Post by **Elennsar** » Fri Jan 09, 2009 7:33 am

The problem is that while rewarding it to a degree makes sense (fully), you don't want to wind up with it being -better- to fight with a broken arm.

Other than that, I agree. The players should feel that giving "the last full measure of devotion" is more fun and interesting, and the mechanics should always support the intended kind of play, so...

Personally, if I wanted to reward players, I'd look for OOC rewards...extra slice of pizza, whatever. IC rewards for OOC actions don't feel right (even if you can justify it, it would make more sense to give the player a bonus directly, I think, if the player is the one you want to encourage).

Otherwise, the more I read this, the more I think I want to play in a game with you (either with you as a DM or fellow player), because while we disagree on several details, we seem to have compatible hopes for heroes and heroic adventuring.

Talisman · Post by **Talisman** » Fri Jan 09, 2009 7:35 am

Maybe we can do some sort of PbP?

Elennsar · Post by **Elennsar** » Fri Jan 09, 2009 7:39 am

Hopefully. There are not many people who would be fun to do a paladin with, I think you're one of them, and I've been wanting to do that sort of character for a while.

But regarding the subject...yeah. Heroes are pretty cool. I'd hope any game where we were playing heroes didn't need the DM reinforcing that for everyone to feel that (not that I mind the reinforcing too badly, its just that it would be even better if everyone just did it because they felt it was true. Screw the bennies. : ) ).

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Fri Jan 09, 2009 8:14 am

virgileso wrote:I wasn't confused as to why the final boss needs to be bigger than his minions, I was confused as to why he needs to be baseline HUGE compared to his minions. For encounter progression, I don't see the need for continual escalation of challenges, you can have a tempo of challenge going up and down (and still have the climax at the end).

This wound system already makes future encounters more and more challenging until the climax, so unless you're dumbing down your encounters I'm not sure what your complaint is here.

I already said players want at least the illusion of tension, yet you want even that veil ripped off. Some resource management works, and having difficulty scale based on prior encounter's luck is very unlikely to be that problematic/arbitrary because of the whole aggregate thing (making appreciable variation more unlikely than bad rolls in the last fight).

What aggregate thing? It's not like regular combat where some of them you curbstomp the foes and others you escape by the skin of your teeth--it's a wound you're not allowed to heal into the adventure is over. A wound that inflicts performance penalities that stack on top of how you roll the dice. An encounter that you might've bared scraped by on turns lethal because of something completely arbitrary to the fight at hand. And that's bullshit.

There is a connection I, and hopefully others, want with the character for greater enjoyment. Not having prior events mean anything puts the character in this form of stasis that distances awareness of the character, especially on the scale you're arguing for.

I can understand that, but you should really be searching for a different way to feel story progression other than taking it in the ass on the probability curve.

Enemies learning about your triptastic tactics and forming ways to counter it is good. Enemies who flee the battle earlier than they normally would because they saw the wizard turn someone's body inside out is good. Enemies warning the others so they can get behind reinforcements is also good.

What's not good is just assigning boring penalties to a d20 roll. It causes balance issues, may not come into effect at all, and is simply just too generic to give that combat that extra 'oomph'.

There is also the, I hate to use this word, verisimilitude. This basically means that characters can NEVER suffer anything more severe than a bruise or minor laceration, because otherwise we have broken bones resetting instantly, gaping holes resealing, poison flushing out of the system, etc.

It's a break from reality to facilitate a fair combat system, sort of like not dropping Ancient Wyrm Red Dragons on the starting village even though they're just as likely a monster as a horde of ninja goblins.

Talisman wrote:Well, this is a problem with the system, isn't it? What the hell kind of heroic adventure game doesn't allow you to make heroic, last-minute rescues?

I'm saying that the game shouldn't punish game mechanically more than it should for making a choice expected by the genre. Increasing the chance of death in an encounter from 10% to 30% is woefully unfair, especially when the characters are expected to go on MANY MORE adventures.

I'm also not going to reward players for being so cowardly that they refuse to take any risk of character death, or take on any challenging combat at less than 95% health.

Guess what? Avoiding punishment is the same thing as getting a reward.

If you're going to rip up peoples' character sheets for doing the 'right' thing, then you might as well give them a pat on the back for doing the 'wrong' thing.

Partially true. I don't object to a limited amount of reloads and quick healing; I object to there "we're low on resources; screw the adventure" mentality. It works okay for exploration; not so much for other scenarios.

Look, when the choices come down to 'make a stupid and senseless sacrifice and go home for the night' and 'fuck the DM's zero-sum adventure and find something else to do', I'm going to pick the latter.

I throw your adventure's dumbass guilt trip right back in its face. Seriously, from a game perspective no one gives a shit whether or not the princess gets rescued. D&D continues normally and there will just be another adventure around the corner. The game does care if you get your damn self killed.

I play my damn character, not the setting, and if the setting says 'if you play the game my way then I throw your character sheet in the fire' then my response is FUCK THE ADVENTURE.

Manxome · Post by **Manxome** » Fri Jan 09, 2009 8:17 am

Kinda skimmed the last page, so forgive me if this isn't totally on-target...

Lago, you seem to be assuming that the climax battle must be calibrated such that you have a significant risk of defeat even if you're in perfect condition, and all the battles leading up to it must be calibrated so that you have a significant risk of death, and that the difference between doing well and doing poorly is based mostly on random chance. I don't see why any of those should be the case.

I can easily imagine a campaign set-up where the lead-up fights against the castle guards are all guaranteed "victories," because you're just that badass, but the challenge is to avoid taking any serious injuries or expending significant resources in the process of winning. If you fight ten guards, slaughter them to a man, but get stabbed in the gut in the process, then you "lost" that combat, even through from a narrative perspective you won and you're still chugging along nicely.

Then, at the end of the campaign, there's a climax battle where you seriously might die. The more encounters you "lost" up to this point, the harder it will be to avoid dying, but you've always got a fair chance (either because the worst combination of prior outcomes is only so bad, or because the DM would have ended the campaign prematurely if you were an irredeemable screw-up). How well you did in all the previous battles combines with how well you do in this battle to decide whether you win the campaign; since your previous "wins" and "losses" affect your initial standing in this fight, the outcome is really a measure of how well you played the entire campaign, rather than whether you made good or bad decisions in the last 15 minutes. In this case, when you lose the combat, you die, rather than taking a wound and moving on, but that's because the BBEG is vastly more dangerous than a handful of guards--if the final fight was another handful of guards, there'd be no real risk of losing.

You don't heal all your wounds before the final fight because you can't. There's a time limit, or the king will only order his priests to cast the necessary spells if you win, or there's just a mechanic that says that those wounds cannot be healed by any means prior to the end of the adventure. No shortage of options there.

And if the system is well-designed to support tactical play, the difference between "winning" and "losing" all the encounters should be based primarily on how clever you are, how well you plan, and how well you work as a team, not simply on whether you roll high or low. There are various valid reasons to have more or less randomness in various games, but if your mental image involves more randomness than you're comfortable with, that means that you should reduce the impact of the random factors compared to the skill factors, not that the entire approach must be inherently unworkable.

This hypothetical arrangement does NOT:

Require that the fight with the BBEG be easier than the guards at the entrance
Guarantee that the heroes that press on to the end will all die horribly
Require players to make objectively bad OOC decisions
Eliminate meaningful risk from any encounter
Require that the outcome of the campaign basically comes down to blind luck

Now, this whole get-up may not be what everyone prefers to play. You may want to play a bunch of small combats that have nothing in particular to do with each other (at least strategically), and that's a valid game, too. But the fact that you happen to prefer that doesn't mean that the other option is unworkable.

If you see some obvious reason that no game could possibly function in the manner I've outlined, please point it out for me.

Fuchs · Post by **Fuchs** » Fri Jan 09, 2009 9:32 am

I take another approach when I DM. When handling the "typical" "storm the BBEG's base and rescue X" adventure, I don't run a series of encounters, starting at the gate. I want to avoid the "there's a decent (=party level)challenge at the gate, which you should manage without troubles, then some harder challenge (=party level +2) in the courtyard behind it and if you survive that you have another decent challenge in the hallway to the throne room (=party level), before the big boss fight inside the throne room (=Part level +4)" scripts.

I try to run it as one encounter from start to end. Depending on the players' actions, it may be split up in more easily handled pieces, but it's designed as a single encounter, from the guards at the gate to the throne room's demon. The guards at the gate are more an alarm system than an actual threat, for example, and there usually will only be one battle that matters (and will get played out).

The adventure of course is composed of more challenges than this battle - finding out where the base is, dealing with saboteurs and spys in the "good base" before heading out and handling the political fall out after the battle make up the rest of it, and are equally important (and may even ake much more playtime) than the combat part.

This avoids the 5 minute adventuring day and doesn't force me to have some artificial reasons why the enemies are split in manageable groups and never mass their firepower. It also allows me to usually handwave away post-encounter healing.

It's not perfect, but for my particular preferences (more social interaction, less combats, and if there are battles they should be high-powered, "seat of your pants, go nova right away" affairs) it works decently well.

Draco_Argentum · Post by **Draco_Argentum** » Fri Jan 09, 2009 10:09 am

A game with heroic characters needs to be set up such that being heroic is mechanically optimal.

Fighting with a system assigned wound penalty is no more heroic than fighting in a similar system that halves the wound penalties. Metagame numbers aren't what makes a hero, in game description is. Fighting with a broken arm is heroic and people in other media do it and win, apparently the penalties aren't that bad in certain genres.

As for anyone talking about fighting against the odds, thats not how RPGs work. You're odds on going to win. If your definition of heroic is based on the maths then D&D has no heroes. CR +4 is a 50% win chance and thats as hard as D&D fights are intended to get.

Manxome's setup would work. So would having no carry over penalties and making every fight harder to compensate. Just having penalties mount up causes the game to end or cease being heroic, this option does not work.

Elennsar · Post by **Elennsar** » Fri Jan 09, 2009 10:26 am

A game with heroic characters being set up so that being heroic is mechanically optimal is actually removing "being heroic" because there is no pain or penalty to overcome.

Fighting with a broken arm when that arm being broken means nothing is not heroic. It may be perfectly reasonable, but it isn't an act of courage or fortitude or resolve or cool composure or anything, because the arm being broken doesn't mean anything even as meaningful as "fighting with an ugly hat".

So a hero may well have -8 to his rolls because of his broken arm, but he may win anyway because he did get a 16 (normally needed an eight) and managed to beat the goddamn odds.

As for anyone talking about fighting against the odds, thats not how RPGs work. You're odds on going to win. If your definition of heroic is based on the maths then D&D has no heroes. CR +4 is a 50% win chance and thats as hard as D&D fights are intended to get.

That's not how RPGs which are determined to make it so the PCs rarely lose work. A rpg that actually did NPCs the justice of saying that a NPC of that was say, level 5 and a PC that was would be equals, and that this was normal, would work. And yes, D&D has no heroes for exactly this reason. You almost never have to worry about death, very little more likely about death, never about permanent injury and only rarely about longer term injury.

Not because level 5>level 1, but because PCs arbitrarily are more powerful than those who should be their peers simply because they're PCs.

Manxome's setup would work. So would having no carry over penalties and making every fight harder to compensate. Just having penalties mount up causes the game to end or cease being heroic, this option does not work.

It does not work when you refuse to advance because of the penalties and refuse to actually act in a heroic, risk taking manner because of them, instead of looking at this as an opportunity for your character to -really- show that he or she is a true hero.

If you're afraid of losing a character to the point that you will never truly do anything involving risking that character's life, you can be many wonderful things, most certainly including a good roleplayer, but none of your characters will ever be making the sacrifices (real and potential) that make the difference between a hero (who is willing to sacrifice his life to save the princess) and More Powerful Than You Man, who is only going after the princess because the rewards for saving her are worth his time.

Not the kind of game I want to play, whether playing human scale, larger than life, titans, or any of the other tiers.

Achilles is a big damn butcher, not a courageous warrior.

Fuchs · Post by **Fuchs** » Fri Jan 09, 2009 11:25 am

I have to point out that what a player does is not heroic, no matter the rules and odds. Player characters do heroic stuff within their imaginary setting.