Looking for Trouble - A Dungeon Delver’s Rant

Ok, I’ve been checking out information about the new edition of D&D for a while. Ultimately, I’m a fan of Dungeons and Dragons, and the idea of a new edition is intriguing. I have a stack of books that could probably go to the ceiling if I stacked them up that high. So it’s not as if I don’t understand the whole money issue involved. Ultimately though, you don’t need to buy the new edition any more than you need to buy the tons of expansion books they’ve released over time. A new edition just means you don’t get expansions for the old books from the company [another company has already stepped in to cover that], but otherwise your old books are still usable, etc.

The thing that “grinds my gears”, as it were, are the nitpicky things that people come up with to find fault with the new edition. Ultimately, they are conjuring up things to ahve problems with. One example is, players don’t like the concept of Second Wind, where a character is able to regain hit points by basically catching their breath. It only happens once in each battle, and there are a limited number of times it can be done each day. Ultimately, they argue that is causes a problem with the old concept of hit points, but they are merely creating a fiction so that they can complain about how things are changing. Hit points, have never been more than an expression of how far a character is from death. In 3rd edition, a character’s hit points can signify five conditions. Fine, which is anything from 1 hp to full hit points. Disabled is a special condition when you are at zero. You are concious, but any strenuous effort would drop you below zero, so it basically means “on the brink”. You can then be dying [negative hitpoints and dropping], unconcious [negative hit points, but stable] or flat out dead [negative 10 hit points].

With 4th Edition, you have essentially the same situation, with the addition of the bloodied condition, which can best be defined as “on the ropes”. Ultimately, when you are at half your hit points or less, you are in a condition that is only really different in that a few powers are based off the bloodied condition. Certain characters get angry and “hulk up” when they hit the bloodied mark, while other enemies will react like sharks and try to finish off the character that is in that state. Ultimately though, if your character is concious, with one or more hit points, you suffer no penalties based on how many hit points you have. This has always been the case. So ultimately, whether you see taking hit points as wounds or not, there is never any significant damage happening, because you don’t have any noticeable effects for losing most of your hit points. You don’t get weaker, you don’t lose effectiveness in your attacks, or anything like that. Watch a boxing match, and even superficial injuries will slow you down, soften your blows, and generally tire you out. Losing hit points might mean you are battered, bruised, and covered with scratches and scrapes. So, looking at it from that perspective, from the logic of how the game has always worked, gaining hit points does not necessarily mean your body healing physically. I see the second wind working like a boxer going back to his corner and getting a short rest, before coming back out swinging. Even that one “round” of not fighting is enough to keep you in the fight that much longer. The design is such that you can only take a second wind once per fight, and that you have a limited number per day. The superhuman body of the fantasy world is still only able to stave off death for so long without needing a full night’s rest. You still have “magical” healing either from a cleric’s divine power giving you a bit more bang for you buck when he heals you, or a paladin’s lay on hands ability allowing him to use his “reserve” on you. It creates a system that is actually more realistic, where over time you run out of the abilty to stitch yourself together and keep going, instead of only running out when you have no more potions/cleric spells to burn or cure wands left.

However, it all boils down to people coming up with reasons why rules pull them out of their world where characters take horrific wounds that neither slow them down, weaken them, nor hurt their accuracy, but aren’t able to ‘heal’ those wounds without magical assitance.