Quote from: AsenRG;1020124And my point is that my tastes run towards the "no inappropriate death".
 

The original statement made by Gronan was "There is no such thing as "unsuitable death"" , with no qualifications. I was disputing that.

Quote from: Skarg;1020099Consider how many miles you are away from the healing rule in 0D&D:
"On the first day of complete rest no hit points will be regained, but every other day thereafter one hit point will be regained until the character is completely healed. This can take a long time."

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1020110Don't know how it is in later editions, but Skarg is right that in OD&D Cure Light Wound is a clerical spell that is treated like all other spells.  And a first level cleric doesn't even get a spell.
I usually play it that clerics get all spells available rather than random ones like magic-users, it makes the cleric's life a bit easier and helps the whole party.  But as Skarg pointed out, things look WAY different when your cleric says "I can cure 2-7 points of damage, ONCE."

Well, to be fair, you are miles away from OD&D--as in, these are very very different games with very different playstyles, assumptions, etc. I don't particularly like the confluence of rules and abilities (and what they incentivize) that 5e ended up with, but I'm also not going to fault it for not being OD&D.

OD&D (and the rest of TSR D&D, which never adapted this, even though virtually everything else changed), had its' own perverse incentives and outcomes. For instance:

• first and foremost, of course, is that the party needs a cleric (and the cleric must survive at all costs, even though they are also some kind of front line warrior-mage)
• second, favoring damage avoidance mechanism (such as boosting AC, hiding behind an ally, mirror image/blur/etc.) over increasing one's hit points as a measure of battle resilience, despite the fact that that is what HP were intended to be.
• low-level, less experienced characters can naturally heal (in percentage of total) more quickly than high level characters
• characters relying on natural healing should just wait days and days to heal, making it just an extended 15-minute workday just the same as later editions (or conversely, it pushes the DM to make days and days of wandering monster rolls, either way becoming a bookkeeping exercise in search of a reason other than a false conceit to 'realistic natural healing.'

3e moved to naturally healing 1hp per level or hd, which had the perverse incentive of making wizards better able to naturally heal (in percentage of total) more quickly than barbarians.

I'm saying this to point out that the healing back to full overnight part at least was chasing good ends, and was a response to genuine dissatisfaction--most notably that clerics were still mandatory despite there now being 11 classes (and 3e's attempt to incentivize players to want to play clerics/druids had gone haywire), and that natural healing was usually just an extended bookkeeping exercise. The designers' hearts were in the right place, it is simply the implementation that failed.

My method of addressing this is to rule that healing at 0hp can stabilize an ally, but they are still out of the fight. Thus no incentive to finish them off. HP heal fully not after a long rest but after a full 24 hours of uninterrupted rest (Long Rest only restores the standard 1/2 * level HD to spend on short-rest healing). And for the assassin-- again, you do not need a rule set to tell you that an assassin who sneaks up on a sleeping person can slit their throat (which bypasses the hp mechanic, although I would rule that near-immediate magic healing could save them).

Quote from: S'mon;1020122Not that I'm aware of - never seen anything like that in my games, even with a 13th-16th level Cleric in one.

A 5e Cleric-1 just gets 2 spell slots that can be used for curing, either cure wounds or healing word. This is less than a typical 1e AD&D Cleric gets - 3 with 2 bonus slots for WIS.

Checking the 5e SRD at http://media.wizards.com/2016/downloads/SRD-OGL_V1.1.pdf I see the Life Domain Cleric can swap out turning undead once per short rest for healing 5 hp/level; once per short rest. A short rest is 1 hour.

Personally, IMC I use the one week long rest option from the 5e DMG, this means a Clr-1 IMC gets 2 cure spells per week. By default a LR is overnight so they get 2 cures per day, better than OD&D-Classic but less than 1e AD&D.

According to mAcular Chaotic's example that we're talking about, his PCs have four healers who managed to bring the victim up from 0 HP six times in the fight, so the assassin realized they could heal him as fast as she could hurt him, so she had to flee. I've seen quite a few threads where it's mentioned as a feature/issue in 5e that PCs tend to get knocked to 0 HP and healed each turn.

But that and other things that sound not to my taste have generally kept my interest in reading 5e low. But let's take a quick Google peek. Hmm, ok, there's this Paladin class feature:

QuoteLay on Hands
Your blessed touch can heal wounds. You have a pool of Healing power that replenishes when you take a Long Rest. With that pool, you can restore a total number of hit points equal to your paladin level x 5.

As an action, you can touch a creature and draw power from the pool to restore a number of hit points to that creature, up to the maximum amount remaining in your pool.

Alternatively, you can expend 5 hit points from your pool of Healing to cure the target of one disease or neutralize one poison affecting it. You can cure multiple Diseases and neutralize multiple Poisons with a single use of Lay on Hands, expending hit points separately for each one.

This feature has no effect on Undead and constructs.

I don't know the rest of the rules, so I could be missing something, but that reads to me like you could raise someone from 0 HP to 1 HP a number of times equal to 5 times your Paladin level. I assume paladins are also strong fighter types, so you don't even have to have a dedicated healer PC to get that.

Let's check Clerics... oh, "sweet":

QuoteChannel Divinity: Preserve Life
Starting at 2nd level, you can use your Channel Divinity to heal the badly injured.

As an action, you present your holy Symbol and evoke Healing energy that can restore a number of hit points equal to five times your cleric level.

Choose any creatures within 30 feet of you, and divide those hit points among them. This feature can restore a creature to no more than half of its hit point maximum. You can't use this feature on an Undead or a construct.

Am I right that these class "features" can be spammed every turn as needed? This one doesn't even seem to have a limited pool that wears out. And it looks like it lets you heal anyone within 30 feet, meaning you could be 15 feet behind the front lines to avoid getting taken out yourself, while basically healing any PCs who were at 0 HP back to 1 HP every turn forever. Am I wrong?

And even if a PC actually dies, there's a 3rd level Cleric spell called Revivify which would also repair a dead PC to 1 HP.

First off thanks to Steven and Willie for answering. I appreciate how tedious it can be explaining rules to the ignorant, which I mostly am in the case of 5E and I appreciate you guys patiently making the effort.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell;10199401. Handling time, especially for monsters.

How so? Don't monsters with negative hits usually just end up as completely dead, so any handling after they go below zero would be minimal at most?

Quote2. I think it simplifies the surrounding rules somewhat.  If you can't go negative, you don't need special cases to handle different states of negative.  Plus, the negative points are rather pointless with Death Saves.

My ignorance of the 5E rules makes me not understand what you mean by different states of negative.

While I sort of get your point about Death Saves making negative points kind of superfluous, wouldn't tracking make Death Saves rather pointless, so then we are left with a choice of which flavor does one prefer tracking both positive and negative hits or tracking positive hits, negative hits but only when over a threshold, and tracking and making Death Saves?

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1019979Simplicity. Always simplicity. Much like Dis/Advantage, it creates bizarre situations in the purported goal of simplicity.

Maybe it's the mathematician in me talking but tracking negative hit points is at most only minimally more complex than tracking any sort of hit points in the first place. And to my mind avoiding the bizarre situation of the jack-in-the-box characters is certainly worth some minimal additional complexity.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1020130Well, to be fair, you are miles away from OD&D--as in, these are very very different games with very different playstyles, assumptions, etc. I don't particularly like the confluence of rules and abilities (and what they incentivize) that 5e ended up with, but I'm also not going to fault it for not being OD&D.
...

Sure,  I agree with and/or appreciate much of what you posted.

But that's not what I was trying to express. I didn't mean to hold up 0D&D as a gold standard (though many like it well enough, or do still prefer it). Rather I was remarking at how extreme the distance the healing situation is between 0D&D and 5e, because I thought it was interesting and also to suggest that mAcular Chaotic reflect on the proportions of that chasm when being concerned with house-ruling something so much smaller, such as his idea of a fatigue level effect for getting wiped out and raised.

Quote from: Skarg;1020099I thought 0D&D tended to give out spells at random rather than player selection...

Not originally. That was introduced in the Greyhawk supplement along with a lot of new spells for both MUs and Clerics. And I think it only applied to MUs, not to Clerics.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1020130I don't particularly like the confluence of rules and abilities (and what they incentivize) that 5e ended up with, but I'm also not going to fault it for not being OD&D.

Fair point.

Quote[1] first and foremost, of course, is that the party needs a cleric (and the cleric must survive at all costs, even though they are also some kind of front line warrior-mage)

That is not my experience of OD&D. My PC's seldom had a cleric in the party and the parties I ran as a DM had a cleric less than half of the time.

Quote[2]  second, favoring damage avoidance mechanism (such as boosting AC, hiding behind an ally, mirror image/blur/etc.) over increasing one's hit points as a measure of battle resilience, despite the fact that that is what HP were intended to be.

Some truth to this, but better AC via better armor is part of what distinguished the fighters and to an extent the auxiliary fighters like clerics from the non-armor wearing MUs. To my mind, better armor making one more durable is a properly aligned incentive. I think the AC quest outside of better armor became more generally true with the addition of DEX bonuses to AC and more magic items, like Bracers of Protection, that boosted AC.

Quote[3] low-level, less experienced characters can naturally heal (in percentage of total) more quickly than high level characters

I agree with you here. This is counter to the game's explanations of what hit points actually represent. I assume part of the reason for it was (a) the simplicity of addition over using ratios, division, and multiplication and (b) a conscious decision to make hit points an expendable resource that needed to be managed.

Quote3e moved to naturally healing 1hp per level or hd, which had the perverse incentive of making wizards better able to naturally heal (in percentage of total) more quickly than barbarians.

I wonder if a better (though still simple) solution might have been to have MUs heal 1 pt/day regardless of level; Clerics and Thieves to heal 1 pt/2 or 3 levels; and Fighters to heal 1 pt/level.

QuoteMy method of addressing this is to rule that healing at 0hp can stabilize an ally, but they are still out of the fight.

Seems reasonable.

Lay on Hands is even better than that.

You get a pool of hit points to spread around. You can use any chunk of it that you want. So if you have 20 hit points of healing, you can blow all 20 hit points in one blow to heal someone, or just give them 1 hit point 20 separate times.

And we had three Paladins, and a Cleric. Actually, the Druid and Bard in the party had healing spells too.

Quote from: Skarg;1020135According to mAcular Chaotic's example that we're talking about, his PCs have four healers who managed to bring the victim up from 0 HP six times in the fight...

I think 4 healers (edit: or the 6 they actully had!) :eek: is very unusual. Normally a group of 4-6 PCs has 1-2 healers, and things get dicey when the healer goes down, as happened IMC on Sunday when the Bard Trystan went down to the orc attack in round 1. If the elven Fighter Hatala had not bought a healing potion at the start of the session, and used it at exactly the right moment (with an Action Surge) to get Trystan back to positive hp, I'm sure it would have been a TPK.

IMO it was a nice dramatic moment. IME 5e healing is one of the many things about 5e that seem to work a lot better in practice than in theory - the XP chart is another.

Quote from: Skarg;1020135Am I right that these class "features" can be spammed every turn as needed?

You are wrong - I posted about this specific ability just an hour ago upthread! It recharges on a short rest, ie 1 hour.

A Paladin could technically use his Action to Lay On Hands repeatedly for 1 hp squirts, yup. That's mostly a bad use of a Paladin, but it is worth him holding back a few LoH hp in case someone goes down.

I've never seen the 'repeatedly popping back up' thing IMCs - IMC after it happens once or twice, the enemy are careful to finish off the fallen, which for multi-attack foes (most foes from level 5 up) is usually pretty easy to do. 2 melee hits on a 0 hp target is an auto-kill. I don't find this particularly implausible either; a final stab to a dying foe 'just to make sure' is so common IRL it's practically SOP.

Quote from: Bren;1020137Maybe it's the mathematician in me talking but tracking negative hit points is at most only minimally more complex than tracking any sort of hit points in the first place. And to my mind avoiding the bizarre situation of the jack-in-the-box characters is certainly worth some minimal additional complexity.

Perhaps. It is just my opinion as to why, but it fits. Two blind swordsmen swinging at each other do so with the same chance to hit as two sighted opponents (since each others' advantage and disadvantages cancel each other out), and that is also a bizarre situation one might say is worth additional complexity.

Beyond that

• The game is not designed for mathematicians, it is designed for mathematicians to play with their less mathematically inclined friends and everyone's children.
• Negative hp was itself a jerryrigged rule that helped create some space between fully functional at 1 hp and dead, not some well designed thing that must be kept in perpetuity because it worked so well (in particular, in later editions where damage was no longer usually 1d6, -10hp in one edition wasn't the same as -10 hp in another).
• The jack-in-the-box effect is the result of multiple factors coming together, not simply the no-overflow/end-of-negative-hp change in the rules.
• 3e had the negative-hp-drowning-heal accidental rule confluence, to which WotC heard years of people using it as evidence that they didn't know how to write a game (despite it being virtually impossible to abuse).
• Very complex games from 4e to GURPS (with all the rules turned on) to HERO System to Aftermath to whatever... are not doing all that well in the marketplace compared to 5e, OSR games, and the like (Pathfinder being a notable exception).

Again, not making any moral or 'should' statements. Only that I can see lots of reasons why WotC might have chosen this direction for this edition.

Quote from: Skarg;1020138Rather I was remarking at how extreme the distance the healing situation is between 0D&D and 5e,

Yes, but IME the difference between 5e and 1e isn't very big at all.

Quote from: S'mon;1020145You are wrong - I posted about this specific ability just an hour ago upthread! It recharges on a short rest, ie 1 hour.

A Paladin could technically use his Action to Lay On Hands repeatedly for 1 hp squirts, yup. That's mostly a bad use of a Paladin, but it is worth him holding back a few LoH hp in case someone goes down.

I've never seen the 'repeatedly popping back up' thing IMCs - IMC after it happens once or twice, the enemy are careful to finish off the fallen, which for multi-attack foes (most foes from level 5 up) is usually pretty easy to do. 2 melee hits on a 0 hp target is an auto-kill. I don't find this particularly implausible either; a final stab to a dying foe 'just to make sure' is so common IRL it's practically SOP.

My logic was that the assassin realized they would get overcome by the remaining enemies if they used their attacks to finish off the one PC. Her blows had the chance to knock someone unconscious because of poison, so it was worth throwing attacks at the remaining guys to just thin the herd a bit and take the pressure off of a 6 on 1 fight.

I wouldn't say the PCs full function is healing, but everyone has a little healing at least.

It's funny, whenever I've even tried the final stab, someone always complains that it's unrealistic even though they do the same thing. Tough cookies.

A short rest to get back up again could be a good idea, but... I can also see it leading to cases where the party decides they can't risk waiting, and plow on ahead, leading to that PC just being a spectator the entire night. So the exhaustion is probably better since it lets them keep playing but not make it painless.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1020148It's funny, whenever I've even tried the final stab, someone always complains that it's unrealistic...

Yeah. They would say that, wouldn't they. Players will try all kinds of tricks/whines/begging to try to stop PC death, especially perma-death.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1020146Beyond that
[1] The game is not designed for mathematicians, it is designed for mathematicians to play with their less mathematically inclined friends and everyone's children.

Sadly true. It makes me nostalgic for DC Heroes and it's math friendly AP system.

Quote

• Negative hp was itself a jerryrigged rule that helped create some space between fully functional at 1 hp and dead, not some well designed thing that must be kept in perpetuity because it worked so well (in particular, in later editions where damage was no longer usually 1d6, -10hp in one edition wasn't the same as -10 hp in another).

Fair point. I come at this from having played a lot of Runequest where negative hit points are a thing that gets tracked so using negative hit points seems like a natural thing to do.

Quote[3] The jack-in-the-box effect is the result of multiple factors coming together, not simply the no-overflow/end-of-negative-hp change in the rules.

I get that. But the effect seems easily foreseeable and something that 5E should have been designed to avoid.

Quote[4] Very complex games from 4e to GURPS (with all the rules turned on) to HERO System to Aftermath to whatever... are not doing all that well in the marketplace compared to 5e, OSR games, and the like (Pathfinder being a notable exception).

I don't know that complexity is the major reason those games aren't doing better in the market place. D&D 3E/4E and Pathfinder seem like pretty complex games to me and that set of games seemed to do better than GURPS or HERO. While being simpler than some RPGs probably doesn't hurt, a lot of the success of 5E is just that it is the new iteration of D&D -- the first mover, market leader, and generic face of table top RPG games. Being perhaps a bit simpler than 3E/4E/Pathfinder

Maybe it is intentionally designed this way? The DMG provides "massive damage" options to make things more lethal at least.