You know, I think there's a more-generous and a less-generous way to interpret all this..

They added some clarification today:

Could a safe rest location, as discussed in Legends & Lore: Hit My Points, also include areas outside of towns—hidden groves for a druid or ranger perhaps? Could a campsite be made safe enough to restore full hit points during a rest?

Absolutely. Additionally, we might have other ways for characters to create a safe environment. For example, a character with the right background, feat, or class feature might be able to make a camp in the wilderness that provides the same comforts (regarding hit point recovery) as resting in town; a good example might be the ranger finding a secluded area sheltered from the weather, and then finding supplies for the camp to transform it into something far more comfortable than your typical campsite.

Fucking called it: class and feat modifiers. Not limited to generic caution, available to all classes, but fucking mechanical system mastery.

Welcome to D&D Sleep Number TempurPedic edition.
:rant:

Quote from: Opaopajr;661175Fucking called it: class and feat modifiers. Not limited to generic caution, available to all classes, but fucking mechanical system mastery.

Welcome to D&D Sleep Number TempurPedic edition.
:rant:

Yep. Another instance of you must take this class along if don't want to completely suck.

Quote from: Opaopajr;661175Fucking called it: class and feat modifiers. Not limited to generic caution, available to all classes, but fucking mechanical system mastery.

The assumption that characters are incompetent with a specific feat/skill/class feature/power listed on their character has become so common that I had to add the following rule to Microlite74:

QuoteBasic Adventuring Skills: Unless a player specifies otherwise about a character at character creation, all characters are assumed to have basic practical adventuring skills such as maintaining weapons and armor, riding a horse, setting up a camp, swimming, climbing, cooking, first aid, etc., and have a rough idea of the value of common coins, trade goods, gems, and jewels. Success should simply be assumed unless there are unusual conditions.

I was floored to discover that many new players and GMs were deciding that knowledge I (and almost every TSR D&D player I knew) assumed any adventurer-type would likely have was limited to certain classes or backgrounds.

Quote from: Exploderwizard;661183Yep. Another instance of you must take this class along if don't want to completely suck.

As an AD&D fan, I would think you would prefer that, since it's much closer to AD&D than 4e, where every character could do everything.

Quit being facetious. 4e is everyone with supers, but builds to fill niche combat roles, ending with everyone being fabulous-in-equal-measure, like oatmeal. This "mattress factor" deliberately caps you at 1/2 health 'cuz "camping's icky!" unless you pay class/background/feat taxes.

There's a world of difference from the ranger and druid being better trackers and biologists (note, not only, just better) -- a fucking trained skill -- and being discomforted hot house flowers -- apparently an inherited humanoid trait (except fucking elves! just you watch!).

Even Rope Use in 2e EXPLICITLY STATES it is above and beyond normal tying of knots. It's trick knots, speed knots, self-untying knots from the right tug, unconventional rope materials, etc. things that the average person can try, slowly, with explanation, but an expert can blow you away with their skill. Regular knot skill is assumed to be present to everyone.

The basic difference between the two philosophies people are opposing here:

"If the rules don't tell you you can do it, then you can't."

VS.

"If the rules don't specifically forbid you to do it, then you can."

The statement quoted from WotC comes across as the former, while most of the people I've known playing AD&D and other "old school" versions of the game are more keen on the latter. The latter's the way I prefer, personally.

I'm sorry for losing it, but this just pisses me off. I've been rather over-saturated this week with 3.xe/PF play lately and I'm sick and tired of granular CCG-ifying of every damn little thing. And with this it looks like WotC is up to its old attitude and thinks expanding it into banal things. Like a bait and switch, it feels; "we'll take away some AEDU, but how about some CCG in natural healing?"

FWIW, I think this particular scenario of healing is pretty weak, excuse wise.  I mean, on the surface, I can completely understand why a person who spends most of their lives in the woods would be able to rest better than some city folk.  But the way the rules are, I have two issues with this.

First, if the reason a ranger or druid gets full rest is because that's what they are used to, why would that impact how much rest a city folk would get?  Does the city guy sleep on the ranger or something?  I mean, it's not like the ranger or druid makes the bedroll at camp any more comfortable or something.

Secondly, if you have the assumption that somehow the ranger or druid do make the entire camp more comfortable, why couldn't that be a skill everyone learns after the first couple times?  It's not like it's learning a new language or anything.

But really, my personal preference is to base healing the same for everyone based on activity, and rather than have a weird limit of, "you can heal completely after one night, but only up to half max in certain situations", I'd just limit the number of hp healed per night.

I think are going to be optional, unless I missed the update on that, so if there is a feat you can take to improve outdoor healing, it will most likely not be an issue if you are not using those rules (though it may be a class feature). I rather like the idea of a class feature that makes rangers more survivable through better healing in the wilderness. I still think the rule needs work and I have some concerns, but this seems like a decent concept. They are trying to appeal to 3E people as well, not just the OsR crowd, so I think this is a step toward that. It certainly doesnt trouble me the way healing surges, skill challenges or aedu did. Not really paying too much attention to 5E, and not terribly concerned over whether its good or bad, but from a distance, it looks like it mighte pretty good. Nothing so far makes we want to run in terror from 5E the way I did with 4th edition.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;661302I rather like the idea of a class feature that makes rangers more survivable through better healing in the wilderness. .

I do too, but I'd handle it so the ranger or druid would just get a bonus to healing over the other classes when camping in the wilds.  I wouldn't cap healing a half of max though.  Everyone can heal all the way up, but the rangers heal faster because they are used to those conditions.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;661317I do too, but I'd handle it so the ranger or druid would just get a bonus to healing over the other classes when camping in the wilds.  I wouldn't cap healing a half of max though.  Everyone can heal all the way up, but the rangers heal faster because they are used to those conditions.

I agree the cap is a bit odd. But perhaps I misunderstand what the cap entails. I think a better way to handle it is for healing to simply be slowed by less than ideal resting conditions and accelerated by good resting conditions. It isn't as bad as stuff like surges, but it has some of the same issues behind it, where I suspect it will fit akwardly into certain conditions (at least as it is now described in L&L). Whatever the final rule, hopefully it will be designed so it doesn't create illogical or weird results in these cases. But as far as design issues go, this is way down on my list of concerns (and the core idea itself seems like a good one).

My feeling is, on the whole, they have done a good job trying to understand what people disliked about 4E and responding to those complaints. At the core of this redesign, that is the central issue I think. I have to admit, 4E really colored my perception of WOTC and this whole process has for me been about slowly being convinced they are not still stuck in that mindset.

Quote from: MearlsFor instance, the Ravenloft setting focused on gothic horror. It introduced mechanics to D&D that measured a character's fear and sanity. That sort of rule is common in horror RPGs, making it a good fit for Ravenloft. On the other hand, such rules wouldn't make sense in the heroic world of the Forgotten Realms. In Ravenloft, a horrific vampire is scary enough to break a high-level fighter's mind or cause that character to run in terror. In the Realms, a high-level fighter draws a sword and leaps to battle the monstrosity.

Hit points are D&D's genre emulation mechanic because they tell us that some characters, specifically higher level ones, can survive attacks that would slay lesser mortals. Just as an action hero can beat up a dozen mooks at once, a D&D character can survive increasing dangers with increasing character level. Hit points fuel much of that capability.

Someone in the gaming den had a comment which was interesting, in that they commented that 'levels' were a better genre emulator that hit points i.e. rather than having variable hit point recovery rules or whatever, you just have low-level characters in Ravenloft and high-level characters in Forgotten Realms.
(I'm sure its traditional, I've seen Ed Greenwood stat up random caravan guards as 7th level fighters).

I also wonder how much they could make the older edition and 4E crowds happy just by making the 4E stuff work for high-level play i.e. if they'd done it so past level 10 or whatever, characters started getting the various feats and powers, more rapid HP recovery, whatever.

Quote from: Opaopajr;661175Fucking called it: class and feat modifiers. Not limited to generic caution, available to all classes, but fucking mechanical system mastery.

Welcome to D&D Sleep Number TempurPedic edition.
:rant:

It rather depends on how the whole thing is balanced and integrated.  I am not a fan of what I have seen of Next, but it is possible it will be carefully thought out and allow different classes to have different niches.  It might be interesting if the wizards need a town but the warriors and rogues are just fine living rough.  

Of course, the wrong spell could blow this apart.  And that is the real tricky design problem with D&D (that NOBODY is good at).  How do you create a lot of content (> 20 books) without power creep and unfortunate ability combinations as the books continue to go out.  Pathfinder shows some signs of this and they have been extremely careful.  

The 2E solution was game worlds, but I am not sure that would work so well today.