The Resilient Hero

Demascus coughed up grit. He tried to spit, but his mouth was too dry. Why was it so dark? He shook his head to clear his brain fog. Where was he? He remembered fighting a drow matron and . . . a dragon. Then a death-dealing amount of rock had dropped on his head.

He couldn’t see anything. Something pinned his legs, and his hands were with sticky with his own blood. The air was thick, not just with dust, and each breath felt like a foot on his chest. The air’s turning bad, he realized. But if he didn’t find some surcease from his wounds, how quickly he’d suffocate would be academic . . .

A few of my previous blogs touched on magical healing in the game. Based on the discussions those and other blogs engendered, today’s discussion focuses on the idea of the resilient hero.

In the situation above, Demascus’s ability to bounce back from wounds is all-important, because he’s alone. No healer or other supernatural agency seems likely to rescue him before he dies of his wounds or his air goes bad. If this story was playing out within the confines of a D&D game, the edition in which it occurs makes a big difference as to how likely Demascus is to survive.

Above and beyond the nature of negative hit points, as discussed in [1] A Close Call with Negative Hit Points, a character’s survival chances also depend on rules for natural healing (or in other words, a character’s access to self-healing).

Earlier editions of D&D are especially stingy with options for characters to heal themselves naturally. In this way, they simulate real-world recovery time from trauma. For instance, the 1st Edition Advanced Player’s Handbook indicates that for each day of rest, a character naturally heals 1 hit point. In these games, reliance on magic is really the only way to be a resilient hero.

Later editions provide more options, such as the 3rd edition’s Heal skill. But even with long term care, each full day’s worth of bed rest provides only 4 hit points for a wounded character. Magic remains the best way to bounce back into the action.

The current edition introduced the concept of healing surges. Healing surges provide every character an ability to get their second wind, so to speak, several times per day (but not an unlimited number of times). The benefit, of course, is that 4th edition allows for games that have resilient heroes that don’t rely so heavily on magical healing. To some extent, this approach removes simulation in favor of portraying heroes who can take a licking but are able to keep coming back for more. However, healing surges have suffered some criticism in that they feel a little too “game-y” and not grounded enough in the world. In fact, such criticism has come even from the many players who enjoy having personal access to self-healing.

Which leads me to my questions for today.

Question 1: What kind of access should player characters have to self-healing?

Characters shouldn’t gain any special access to self healing.

Characters should have access to limited self healing.

Characters should have access to unlimited self healing.

Question 2: In a game that provides limited access to self healing, which do you prefer?

I like healing surges just fine, don’t go changing.

I like the idea of self-healing, but try something more organic to D&D.

I have a different opinion I’ll explain in the comments.

Pushing Beyond Low Earth Orbit

Who knows if it'll last, but I'm going to dust off my old webiste, SpacePush.Com in honor of the news with Planetary Resources.

Pushing beyond low earth orbit never seemed so close as now: http://spacepush.com !!

Imagination and the Grid

When I first started playing D&D, oh so many years ago, fights with monsters played out entirely in the Theater of the Mind (TotM). A typical fight went something like so:

        Me: “I listen at the door.”

        DM: “All’s quiet.”

        Me: “Great. I push it open, sword ready.”

        JD: “My wizard is right behind Bruce!”

        DM: “The room is L-shaped, 20 feet wide. Some trash lies along the walls and . . . there’s a wooden chest lying on it’s side, half splintered, like someone dropped it. Coins are visible through the cracked lid.”

        Me: “We enter, but we’re ready for a trap. No one leaves treasure just lying around.”

        DM: “Nothing happens.”

        Me: “Fine. I kick the chest with my boot.”

        DM: “The lid comes off completely. Gold coins spill everywhere!”

        Me: “Well, I guess we shouldn’t look a gift horse in--”

        DM: “Around the corner of the room come four orcs! ‘Surface dwellers! Kill them, cut them to mincemeat! Pound them to hamburger!’ they yell. The first two catch you by surprise and attack [he rolls dice]. One misses, one rolls a 17, and hits you for 5 points of damage! The other two avoid and go around you, and charge the wizard.”

        Me: “By Moradin’s tangled beard! I attack the closest one [I roll dice]. An 18!”

        DM: “You hit. How much damage?”

        Me: “Six points.”

        “DM: “That’s enough, you cut it in half.”

         [The fight continues until all four orcs lie dead, and the poor wizard behind me lies unconscious.]

        Over time, our D&D fights grew more complex, perhaps featuring more than one kind of monster, and with monsters potentially arrayed in different areas across a larger location. In such instances, the DM would sometimes sketch out the battle on a piece of scratch paper, and update it as the fight progressed.

        Of course, as subscribers of Dragon Magazine, we were keenly aware of all the amazing miniatures that other people painted and used in their games. Eventually we gathered enough miniatures (or, failing that, a square of paper with a name and a facing arrow on it) to track position on the table-top instead of using sketches.

        And so it went . . .

        With the launch of 3rd Edition, miniatures become a more expected part of the D&D game experience, which was only solidified in 4th Edition, where every fight was assumed to occur on a battle grid, and where tracking every space a character could move and every kind of action a character could take was important in determining success or failure in a fight.

        Each of these methods has its pros and cons, more than I can list here (which doesn’t mean it isn’t an important pro or con, only that I have limited space). But here’s a broad overview:

        TotM is quick! Fights happen quickly, and adventurers move steadily through the adventure, exploring many more rooms, having many more NPC encounters, and concluding many more fights than D&D that relies solely on grid-based tactical encounters. The down-side is that TotM can be confusing, and sometimes the players and DM have different views on the positions of all those involved, which isn’t ideal.

        Roughly sketching the positions of combatants on scratch paper (or a white board, if you’re lucky) has the advantage of being fairly quick, while giving players a reasonable idea of who’s where and what the environment looks like.

        Using minis to track general position allows players both to identify with a mini of their own character, and get a better three-dimensional sense of their character’s surroundings.

        Finally, using precise tactical rules and a well-drawn battle-grid gives characters an exact understanding of where their characters stand, where each monster and hazard in the environment is situated, and how their movement and special abilities will interact. Of course, tactical fights on a grid take far longer than fights using TotM, and when all conflict is relegated to the grid, a night of play may only see you through a single combat before it’s time to end.

        That’s the general run down. But here’s the thing--is it important that every fight in on ongoing D&D game use exactly the same format for every encounter? Or should the game rules encourage the DM to set up a particular encounter using the method most appropriate to resolving it, whether that be TotM, the tactical grid and its associated rules, and points between?

QUESTION: What’s your preferred style of simulating D&D Combat?

ANSWERS:

Theater of the mind

Sketch the fight on scratch paper

Use minis, but only for tracking rough position

Use minis, a grid of some sort, and full tactical rules

Use whichever method is suited to a particular encounter

I have a different method that I’ll explain in the comments

Wonderful Promotional Video

Well, check this out--a promotional video on the Rise of the Underdark and Lolth's schemes, and my novel Spinner of Lies, are connected. Demascus must contend with nothing less than a priestess of Lolth (even as he attempts to defeat all the ghosts of past incarnations).

Crypt of the Ninja Queen

D&D’s beating heart is its wealth of adventures. Recall titles like Keep on the Borderlands, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, Ravenloft, the Shackled City adventure path, and Tomb of Horrors. Remember the images that modules such as Pharaoh, City of the Spider Queen, White Plume Mountain, Tearing of the Weave, and the Temple of Elemental Evil conjure. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Vault of the Drow, Madness at Gardmore Abbey, Gates of Firestorm Peak, Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun--

Ahem.

Let’s take it as given that D&D contains a mighty corpus of great published adventures, to say nothing of the millions of campaign adventures played at card and kitchen tables around the world over the last 40 years. What happened to the rest of the party after the wizard probed the lightless confines of the great green devil face by jumping through, what occurred when you woke up in a coffin to Strahd’s voice coming through the thin wood, and the aftermath of a thousand foot fall when you were clutching a cracked cask containing a piece of the sun; these and stories like these circulate around game tables, growing more epic with each retelling.

Such stories, when they include published adventures especially, serve as the nostalgic mortar that binds even disparate groups of gamers. Even if every group didn’t lose half its number to a disguised sphere of annihilation, or befriend Meepo, many encountered Acererak’s leering trap, and nudged a weeping kobold in the ribs. These shared experiences are a storied tapestry that knits even far-flung groups of D&D players together into a community of gamers.

Which brings me to Mike Mearls’ Legends & Lore column a few weeks ago, where he contemplated the idea of one hour adventures. To be sure, no one’s going to play through the Caves of Chaos in one hour, but they might clear out a cave of goblins looking for a kidnapped merchant’s son or a misplaced relic hidden in a keg of vinegary wine.

Moving forward into the next edition of the game, we’re likely to see adventures that can play out in the space of just an hour. But we’ll also some adventures that require a few hours, and some that take several sessions of play. What’s important will be the commonality of experience that such adventures can generate among the community of D&D players. If we’re smart, open to good ideas, take the time and effort to craft a wonderful set of new stories, and let’s admit it, a little bit lucky, the first few adventures may eventually take their place beside the epic legends of years past.

Individual adventures always have overarching styles, though of course the best adventures usually include several elements. For example, urban adventures are often heavy on the roleplaying, while dungeon adventures feature exploration. But I’ve certainly played urban adventures that included a lot exploration in sewers, warehouses, and manor houses, and had my share of alliance-making in the depths of mazed dungeons.

So, what elements of adventure design appeal most important to you? Pick your top three.

Urban Settings (politics between crime lords, nobles, and hidden forces)

Classic Dungeon Settings (what’s in this trapped chest?)

Episodic Design (short adventures that wrap up in 4 hours or less)

Campaign Design (multi-session adventures, all somehow linked)

Mysteries (who really killed the vault guard on Moondark Eve?)

Geographical Wonders (Castles made of moonlight and Negative Energy Plane citadels)

World Shaking Events (when the gods come to earth, nothing will ever be the same)

Horror (hunger multiplied with each new corpse that kicked shuddered back to animation)

Puzzles and Riddles (thirteen segments on the door, each inscribed with a different rune)

Traps (through the sleep mist haze, a juggernaut on rollers advances)

Roleplaying (chat up the duchess at the masquerade, and learn something of interest)

Combat (I play a dwarf fighter because I like to hew orc necks)

Exploration (the cave complex has five upper levels, and twelve lower deeps)

Story (to tell a well-crafted tale, sometimes player choice is limited)

Open-Ended (nothing is preordained, the story is up to players and their dice)

Arch Villain (behind everything, a nemesis actively works against players)

I have a different favorite element that I’ll explain in the comments

Alternatively, what elements of adventure design appeal least to you? Pick up to three.

Urban Settings (politics between crime lords, nobles, and hidden forces)

Classic Dungeon Settings (what’s in this trapped chest?)

Episodic Design (short adventures that wrap up in 4 hours or less)

Campaign Design (multi-session adventures, all somehow linked)

Mysteries (who really killed the vault guard on Moondark Eve?)

Geographical Wonders (Castles made of moonlight and Negative Energy Plane citadels)

World Shaking Events (when the gods come to earth, nothing will ever be the same)

Horror (hunger multiplied with each new corpse that kicked shuddered back to animation)

Puzzles and Riddles (thirteen segments on the door, each inscribed with a different rune)

Traps (through the sleep mist haze, a juggernaut on rollers advances)

Roleplaying (chat up the duchess at the masquerade, and learn something of interest)

Combat (I play a dwarf fighter because I like to hew orc necks)

Exploration (the cave complex has five upper levels, and twelve lower deeps)

Story (to tell a well-crafted tale, sometimes player choice is limited)

Open-Ended (nothing is preordained, the story is up to players and their dice)

Arch Villain (behind everything, a nemesis actively works against players)

I don’t dislike any of these, in moderation

I have a different least favorite element that I’ll explain in the comments