You know what? Fuck the MST3K Mantra.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I'm with sfdebris on this one.

If a setting or gameplay element requires me not to think about it in order to enjoy it, then it has failed.

Now, I understand that there has to be certain concessions to gameplay and even to peoples' sensibilities to get the game going. I'm also not saying that a game or setting having huge holes in it automatically ruins it. I'm just saying...

Okay, look, he's a 4th Edition example. Death by dehydration/suffocation/thirst, to make a long story short, entails your losing of a healing surge every time you fail a linearly-increasing Endurance. When you run out of healing surges you take your level in damage.

Since hp in 4th Edition D&D is almost, but not quite a function of your level this creates stupidity like a 1st level character being able to go without food weeks longer than a 30th level badass.

So what's the solution I often get for this rule? To not worry about it. Even though the fix would be embarrassingly easy: just make hp deplete a flat percentage, which perhaps a caveat depending on whether you want to make higher level heroes last longer without food.

You see, I want this to be the mission of The Gaming Den. When we encounter gameplay or setting elements that don't make sense or hold up to scrutiny, they should either be changed or they should be deconstructed until it does work, like in Frank and K's Tome series.

Fuck the MST3K Mantra. Get that shit out of my games.

[virgil]

I'm generally all for that, though I have a threshold before I dump the entire game due to the volume of alterations make it worth a damn...like 4e.

That's been kind of a problem for me, the Tome series make it difficult for me to get the motivation to think that hard about how to fix problems in 3.5. Many of the changes that don't require fundamental alteration of the rules on a massive scale have already been done.

[Bigode]

I'm in theory trying to do some of those, and trust me, there's plenty that could be done, and even some being done by others. Mine's firstly covering the major monster classes (already made a dragon); others are working on item creation and still-problematic schools, for example. I might suggest that you look what the unfinished Tomes (Book of Gears, Tome of Tiamat, Tome of Trees, Tome of Virtue) were about, from the preview posts in the Tome threads, if you've an interest in further fixing. Also, I need to work more on my part ...

[Crissa]

I don't worry about how Paranoids eat and sleep. Until I write a story about them. I don't worry about rules until I use them, and then... Well, if they don't work, why the heck are they there? They had to be specifically added, unlike some sort of omission.

-Crissa

[PhoneLobster]

I was going to say something similar about on screen stupidity and off screen stupidity.

The part of d20 where it's wealth and power rules didn't explain the described off screen economy and society was annoying but really totally insignificant.

The part of the d20 wealth and power rules where it broke into stupidity IN PLAY for the player characters and the management of their story was the big deal.

So yeah. 30th level characters starving faster? It's stupid and should be fixed. But it doesn't desperately need to be fixed if it is just an off screen stupidity. If it's a rule we are expected to use (which I assume this is I mean why add it otherwise?) then it is an on screen stupidity and needs fixing big time.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I was going to say something similar about on screen stupidity and off screen stupidity.

The part of d20 where it's wealth and power rules didn't explain the described off screen economy and society was annoying but really totally insignificant.

The part of the d20 wealth and power rules where it broke into stupidity IN PLAY for the player characters and the management of their story was the big deal.

So yeah. 30th level characters starving faster? It's stupid and should be fixed. But it doesn't desperately need to be fixed if it is just an off screen stupidity. If it's a rule we are expected to use (which I assume this is I mean why add it otherwise?) then it is an on screen stupidity and needs fixing big time.

Yes, the rule should be fixed because it completely breaks suspension of disbelief and it's easy to fix.

These rules create massive amounts of failure like peasants being able to survive a month and a half without eating anything.

Now, I don't expect them to be fixed anytime soon because like you pointed out players won't run into this rule too often. But 'don't worry about it' shouldn't be the damn solution especially when the solution has a laughably easy fix.

[Psychic Robot]

Re: Suspension of disbelief.

Have you seen the 4e HP rules? You literally can't get injured in the game. If you get dropped from 200 feet, you can rest for six hours and you're back on your feet. If you contract mummy rot, you can rest for six hours and you're magically cured. If you're hit with some kind of terrible poison, you can rest six hours and have no ill effects.

[Roy]

Re: Suspension of disbelief.

Have you seen the 4e HP rules? You literally can't get injured in the game. If you get dropped from 200 feet, you can rest for six hours and you're back on your feet. If you contract mummy rot, you can rest for six hours and you're magically cured. If you're hit with some kind of terrible poison, you can rest six hours and have no ill effects.

Anything + 4.0 = example of this.

[Psychic Robot]

Yes, but that's my number one nerd rage topic. Also, the hack 'n' slash thing that you posted that won the WotC boards.

[Roy]

Yes, but that's my number one nerd rage topic. Also, the hack 'n' slash thing that you posted that won the WotC boards.

And lost the BG boards, because BG = serial WotC style Fail now.

Here's a 3.5 example. Inherent bonuses. Apparently you're supposed to stock pile and fucking chain smoke Wishes, because anything else means wasting expensive resources.

[Username17]

The Wealth by Level rules are such garbage that I can't tell if it's supposed to waste resources or not. I mean some people read that games with more consumable use should get compensatory treasure. The benefits of a Manual of Gainful Skin Flautistry are instantaneously permanent, but it is a consumable. Should I find more treasure in subsequent encounters because I read one?

-Username17

[Roy]

The Wealth by Level rules are such garbage that I can't tell if it's supposed to waste resources or not. I mean some people read that games with more consumable use should get compensatory treasure. The benefits of a Manual of Gainful Skin Flautistry are instantaneously permanent, but it is a consumable. Should I find more treasure in subsequent encounters because I read one?

-Username17

Then there's the Sundertards. Don't get me started on those. Though to be fair, it's not metagaming to know gear = power, since the truth is self evident within the world.

[MartinHarper]

Okay, look, he's a 4th Edition example. Death by dehydration/suffocation/thirst, to make a long story short, entails your losing of a healing surge every time you fail a linearly-increasing Endurance. When you run out of healing surges you take your level in damage.

Since hp in 4th Edition D&D is almost, but not quite a function of your level this creates stupidity like a 1st level character being able to go without food weeks longer than a 30th level badass.

Do you have a thread where the maths for that is worked out? I would have thought that a 30th level character would survive longer. After all, they have many more options for self-healing and such than 1st level characters.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Do you have a thread where the maths for that is worked out? I would have thought that a 30th level character would survive longer. After all, they have many more options for self-healing and such than 1st level characters.

It's really not all that hard to work the math out at all so I don't even need a thread for this error any 4th grader could spot.

You lose your level in hp every time you go a certain amount of time without nourishment after losing all of your healing surges. You can have about 25-35 hp at level 1 without much trouble. Having 200 hit points at level 30 is very hard. If you try very hard, you can have 5 more healing surges due to stat increases and another six due to printed items. Also due to the way DCs and stats increase, a level 30 character will have a best-case skill bonus of about 20 on the first level character with another 5 due to items, which means that they survive for five more rounds due to the DC increasing by 5 each time.

Except for one occasion in the game (the level 23 cleric encounter power Healing Torch) there is no effect that allows you to regain hit points without expending healing surges. So let's just sweep this under the rug.

So let's ladel it on up. The 1st level character, assuming 30 hp, can survive 23 replenishment periods longer than the 30th level character just due to hit points. However, the 30th level super endurance/con monkey can put off actually losing hit points for 16 rounds.

Which means that giving the level 30th character the very best conditions on the fucking game which most characters will be unable to meet he still dies to starvation 2 weeks before Steve the Crap-Covered farmer does.

But you know what? This is just jiggling around numbers to get around the fact that they fucked up the basic math on this and fucked it up hard.

I'm tired of 2nd and 3rd Edition's 'fiddle the numbers a bit and it'll work out okay!' attitude towards problem solving; especially because in this instance the fix would be easy.

[Josh_Kablack]

Except for one occasion in the game (the level 23 cleric encounter power Healing Torch) there is no effect that allows you to regain hit points without expending healing surges. So let's just sweep this under the rug.

That part is factually incorrect.

All of the Cleric's Cure powers are "as if the target had spent a healing surge" (Cure Light Wounds, etc)

Any of the regeneration powers work without surges (Consecrated Ground, Boundless Endurance, Divine Power, Holy Wrath, Longtooth Shifter Racial ability, etc)

Many other healing powers (Inspiring Strike, Purifying Fire, Clarion Call of the Astral Sea, Sunburst, Healing Sun, Victorious Surge, Battle Fervor, No Surrender, Healing Font, Renew the Troops, etc)

Some class and pargaon path features (Inspiring Presence, Enduring Warrior, Hospitilar's Action

And while items are few, there is the Ring of Regeneration

all grant healing without the need to expend a healing surge

The Paladin's Lay on Hands requires the PALADIN to expend a healing surge, but not the target. See also Belt of Sacrifice

Of course there is no guarantee a 30th level character will have access to any of these powers or abilities (in fact they are uncommon and important enough that anyone playing a healer in 4e should really keep track of such things), so your general point stands.

It is pretty easy to see that when HP are calculated as: large initial constant + linear addition per level any damage/time effect that is strictly liner per level will eventually make level a liability instead of an asset.

[Absentminded_Wizard]

Okay, look, he's a 4th Edition example. Death by dehydration/suffocation/thirst, to make a long story short, entails your losing of a healing surge every time you fail a linearly-increasing Endurance. When you run out of healing surges you take your level in damage.

Since hp in 4th Edition D&D is almost, but not quite a function of your level this creates stupidity like a 1st level character being able to go without food weeks longer than a 30th level badass.

Do you have a thread where the maths for that is worked out? I would have thought that a 30th level character would survive longer. After all, they have many more options for self-healing and such than 1st level characters.

Basically, the problem comes down to that Con score bump at level 1. When you go up to level 2, you lose twice as many HP when dehydrating, but your HP maximum isn't doubled. This disparity is going to become more pronounced as you gain more levels.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Except for one occasion in the game (the level 23 cleric encounter power Healing Torch) there is no effect that allows you to regain hit points without expending healing surges. So let's just sweep this under the rug.

That part is factually incorrect.

All of the Cleric's Cure powers are "as if the target had spent a healing surge" (Cure Light Wounds, etc)

Any of the regeneration powers work without surges (Consecrated Ground, Boundless Endurance, Divine Power, Holy Wrath, Longtooth Shifter Racial ability, etc)

Many other healing powers (Inspiring Strike, Purifying Fire, Clarion Call of the Astral Sea, Sunburst, Healing Sun, Victorious Surge, Battle Fervor, No Surrender, Healing Font, Renew the Troops, etc)

Some class and pargaon path features (Inspiring Presence, Enduring Warrior, Hospitilar's Action

And while items are few, there is the Ring of Regeneration

all grant healing without the need to expend a healing surge

The Paladin's Lay on Hands requires the PALADIN to expend a healing surge, but not the target. See also Belt of Sacrifice

Of course there is no guarantee a 30th level character will have access to any of these powers or abilities (in fact they are uncommon and important enough that anyone playing a healer in 4e should really keep track of such things), so your general point stands.

It is pretty easy to see that when HP are calculated as: large initial constant + linear addition per level any damage/time effect that is strictly liner per level will eventually make level a liability instead of an asset.

I stand completely corrected. Since the examples of being able to heal hp are pretty wide (off of the top of my head, I can recall dwarven armor and necrotic gloves) my claim was totally baseless. I apologize.

Even so, all those 'solutions' above just boil down to circumventing a bad rule. It's the equivalent of claiming a monk isn't so bad when you hand him a ring of spell storing with a shapechange in it.


RE: Psychic Robot: Hell, the strongest poison in the game can just barely kill a fully-healthy 1st level PC under the best case conditions.

[Psychic Robot]

Ridiculous, isn't it? While I hated the numbers, CON damage was a great way to do the "holy shit, it's deadly" thing.

[Bigode]

Lago, you're still kinda wrong because healing/inspiring/nurturing/yo momma words are basically assumed.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Lago, you're still kinda wrong because healing/inspiring/nurturing/yo momma words are basically assumed.

What part of 'that's fiddling with the numbers while handwaving the underlying problem' do you not understand?

[RandomCasualty2]

RE: Psychic Robot: Hell, the strongest poison in the game can just barely kill a fully-healthy 1st level PC under the best case conditions.

Well really 3E was kinda the same way. Poisons pretty much sucked, with like maybe the exception of the colossal vermin's poison. But really there wasn't any way you could poison someone's drink and kill them with any reasonable chance of success in either edition.

[Elennsar]

Well, if you could, you'd have a good method of killing PCs with a reasonable chance of success for the kind of scum who use poison.

Not sure if that's undesirable. But it is kind of ridiculous to have a poison capable of killing people and people who use poison existing together without the PCs getting it in their drinks at some point.

My (suspension of) disbelief is feeling the rope tightening just thinking about it.

[Roy]

Some random person will probably die from poison. Even if it's not Con damage, they're still helpless and can't eat or drink... if someone doesn't just stab them.

Real characters? Yeah, poison sucks due to cost and cost/benefit ratio. In other words, too expensive for what it does, and too fucking expensive period.

[MartinHarper]

There is a theme in some fiction of power/magic/whatever making folks hungry. I'm not automatically opposed to higher level folks being more dependent on food.
I think Steve the crap-covered farmer dies first in the desert, since he only has one healing surge. A level 30 character will probably survive in the desert, since he can probably either self-heal, summon food and water, or travel out of the desert.

If I was to change it, I wouldn't make hp deplete a flat percentage, because that means that high-hp classes starve as quickly as low-hp classes, and toughness doesn't help prevent starvation, and so forth. Instead, I'd say that when you fail a healing surge, you lose hit points equal to your level plus 4, which I think is a better way of reducing the impact from those initial hit points from class and constitution.

I agree that 4e poison sucks. The disease mechanics work better for poison, I reckon, with a final state of "dead". Meanwhile, the disease mechanics suck for diseases, because they're not contagious, which is surely the whole point of a disease.

[Lago PARANOIA]

If I was to change it, I wouldn't make hp deplete a flat percentage, because that means that high-hp classes starve as quickly as low-hp classes

Classes with higher hit points have more healing surges than other classes, so a fighter goes about a week longer than his wizard buddy without food.

Furthermore, characters who are a higher level can pass the endurance checks better than their buddies, negating the need to lose healing surges in the first place.

The math does work out like this, I've checked.