Why is the 3.5 built on fragility?

[Endarire]

D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder (and older editions to a similar degree) are built around the notion of, "If you fail a save or if you take a good ol' hit or two, you're dead, KO, or screwed!"  This applies to you, your partymates, and creatures out of the books.

Why?

Why this emphasis on one-shotting or two-shotting something?

[Concerned Ninja Citizen]

The older editions were built on this idea to a much larger degree than 3.x or PF.

As for why... try having a sword shoved in your guts, getting hit with a fireball, or any of the other things a mid level character can expect to survive the first time they happen. Even older editions are much more forgiving than the reality they are, on some level, meant to simulate.

I wonder if the standard expectation being skewed toward tougher, more survivable, characters has to do with video games. Specifically 1st person shooters where your character will often be able to take a half dozen or so gunshots or hits from zombie teeth or similar before dying.

[Jackinthegreen]

The counter-question: Why do people assume that their characters are going to be tough from the start?  The world presented in most D&D universes is brutal, plain and simple.

[Endarire]

Survivability in games helps stories.  Imagine if after every fight scene in Star Wars (any of the movies or books), all the participants died and you needed a new cast every time.  That would make for an awkward story.

Roguelikes simulate danger well.  Games intended to tell deep and meaningful stories need more forgiveness when it comes to injury and malady.

[InnaBinder]

Survivability in games helps stories.  Imagine if after every fight scene in Star Wars (any of the movies or books), all the participants died and you needed a new cast every time.  That would make for an awkward story.

Roguelikes simulate danger well.  Games intended to tell deep and meaningful stories need more forgiveness when it comes to injury and malady.

How many of the Star Wars characters survived almost exclusively because the Storm Troopers had a roughly 40% chance of hitting water if falling out of a floating boat?  How many of James Bond's fights are ridiculously improbable examples of Plot Armor?  Are those the qualities in storytelling you're hoping to find more support for?  If not, what quality of storytelling are you hoping to promote?

My old Creative Writing professor used to have students chant, "What do we want? TROUBLE!  When do we want it? NOW!"  Drama is in conflict with consequences.  Dilute the consequences, and most likely you'll dilute the drama.

[linklord231]

D&D (back when it first came out) wasn't meant to tell deep and meaningful stories.  It was meant to be a game about killing people and taking their stuff.  It was designed to appeal to a crowd who liked tactical combat, and who were probably used to playing wargames where infantry units literally only took one hit to kill.  As mentioned before, it appeals to simulationists when a single arrow or sword wound can be lethal, and gamists tend to enjoy the challenge of overcoming mortal combat. 

Character fragility also makes the win/loss conditions very easy to recognize:  You win if all the enemies are dead, and you lose if you are dead.  If you are dead but your party is not, they can pay the local temple to resurrect you for a penalty.  And since D&D is a game, it's important to be able to tell when you've won or lost. 

Combat in pre-4e was fast, brutal, and challenging.  No matter how many hit points you had, death was always a constant threat.  Many enemies (especially at high levels) had abilities that would turn you to stone, turn you into an NPC, transform you in to one of them, or just say a bad word and kill you, no save.  People say that rocket tag is boring - they're wrong.  It's exhilarating to beat an encounter in the first round, before they can unleash their super-weapon and kill your whole team.  Combat gets boring when the enemy has to spend 6 turns whittling down your hit points.  It only gets exciting when you know beyond any doubt that the enemy's next action will leave you or one of your friends dead.

[Unbeliever]

+1, more or less.

It's worth noting that I don't think people complain too much about Rocket Tag being boring, per se.  The most persuasive complaint that I can think of is that it puts a lot of emphasis on a non-obvious form of system mastery. 

But, yeah, the lineage of D&D explains most of it, although I don't think 3E is overly-focused on fragility.  There's also a bit of a mythological angle as well:  the most famous monsters can kill with a word, petrify with a gaze, and so on.   

[oslecamo]

Indeed, if you check the old legends, most heroes do end up meeting horrible demises at the hands of monsters with dangerous powers (which is why the monsters "gasp" were feared to begin with!)

Ulysses in particular only survives his trip back home because he keeps throwing his allies into the jaws of the monsters he finds to keep them busy so he can escape while being extra-paranoid. Heck, the mermaids alone would've been an auto-loss if he didn't tell his crew to block their ears and tie him to the ship's mast.

Acquilles the uber-warrior meanwhile gets dropped by a single lucky shot from an enemy that wasn't even considered that dangerous combat-wise, mostly because Acquilles insisted on charging ahead all by himself.

In LoTR Frodo, the main characters, gets downed by save-or-lose thrice (four times if you count the books), even the ringwraiths get first nuked at the river and later their leader gets downed by a couple of good blows. The Rowan King also drops from a single Nazgul hit. Boromir fails a will save and almost screws the whole fellowship, and is then runs out of HP facing a bunch of orc mooks all by himself.

So yeah, pre-4e D&D always was about a good bit of paranoia mixed with good preparation.

Plus if you ask me, it's makes for a much better story when the heroes are actually puting their life in the line than hearing about how invincible superdick wins whitout any problem again.

[Endarire]

How does the notion of fragile characters in a dangerous environment change when characters and players do plan for what seems like everything?  (I'm not talking TO here, but a paranoid Wizard can prepare for a variety of things even if he never hides out in a genesis demiplane.)

[Cyclone Joker]

How does the notion of fragile characters in a dangerous environment change when characters and players do plan for what seems like everything?

It doesn't.

[linklord231]

"Know your enemy" becomes even more important.  When things start having blanket immunity to common tactics, you need to know which tactics they don't have immunity to in order to kill them.  That means in-character research, tons of scouting/scrying/other observation, or investing in ways that either breach immunity or timing your attack so you hit them when their buffs are down. 

High level D&D is more like a heist game than a tactical combat game.  More effort goes into planning the assault than the actual event. 

OR you do all your research out-of-character on, say, a charop board, and build your character such that no enemy has immunity to your character's primary method of attack, so it always just works without needing any in-character knowledge.

[veekie]

There is of course, a disconnect between the sense of danger and actual danger. The trouble is getting it across to players. Fragile characters offer tension, but at the same time they can with a bit of misfortune, undermine and ruin entire plotlines, generally disrupting play for a session or two. One other big factor is scale control, the designers tend to significantly underestimate the damage output per second in play, and how small bonuses become big bonuses when attached to additional attacks or multipliers.

There is of course, also the arguments from the realists that surviving those injuries are not realistic. But people can and do survive them in real life, without necessarily being the heroes of legend you play. Arrow and sword wounds tend to be fatal in the sense that you're down, losing a lot of blood, and stuff is going places where there shouldn't be stuff, giving you a bunch of infections even if you survive the blood loss. Access to healing makes up for it to a great extent.

Of course, in legends, heroes do die. They don't however, tend to die to random hazards(though they do fall to puzzle encounter absolutes like petrification), they do pick up permanent disabilities from conflicts, curses, crippling(and defining wounds), etc. They tend to survive the actual conflict itself, dying later of their injuries(which again, healing magic and a party would counteract).

[FlaminCows]

"If you fail a save or if you take a good ol' hit or two, you're dead, KO, or screwed!"

Why this emphasis on one-shotting or two-shotting something?

Aside from the already-mentioned dramatic tension and nod to realism, I'd also like to point out the alternative: hp padding, hp grinding. When PCs and monsters take a number of hits to take down, what happens? The monsters and PCs swing at each other for several rounds of combat, then poof! You're right back where you started, before you changed the number of hits necessary to kill something.

The reason the games make it take few hits to kill something is because those last hits are the only hits that matter. Everything before that was a waste of time, just filler material, like a scene with LaBeouf in the Transformers movies or a fetch quest in WoW or the second paragraph (often more) of any fight R. A. Salvatore writes.

[veekie]

Actually, not quite, you want combat to be varied, and for battle circumstances to change over the course of a battle in order for tactics to be applicable. This is part of the purpose of Vancian, as it enforces variety by being non-spammable(except people manage it anyway), so when combats take more than one action, you need just more viable choices and more importantly for one choice to never be the most optimal all the time.

For much of 3.5, after chargen, martial characters had one and only one tactically optimal option, which is the one they sunk their feats into and specialized for until ToB(which, due to the power structure, enforced variety by simply not letting you repeat your actions). That is a strategy game, with minimal tactics involved.

More hp, more rounds of combat allows more variety, and more time for each move to alter the combat. If each round the player is using the same move, the game designer is doing it wrong.

[linklord231]

Actually, not quite, you want combat to be varied, and for battle circumstances to change over the course of a battle in order for tactics to be applicable. This is part of the purpose of Vancian, as it enforces variety by being non-spammable(except people manage it anyway), so when combats take more than one action, you need just more viable choices and more importantly for one choice to never be the most optimal all the time.

For much of 3.5, after chargen, martial characters had one and only one tactically optimal option, which is the one they sunk their feats into and specialized for until ToB(which, due to the power structure, enforced variety by simply not letting you repeat your actions). That is a strategy game, with minimal tactics involved.

More hp, more rounds of combat allows more variety, and more time for each move to alter the combat. If each round the player is using the same move, the game designer is doing it wrong.

But in 3.5, the battle doesn't change from round to round, unless either someone dies or the wizard drops a Battlefield Control spell.  A creature is just as effective at 1HP as it is at 1000. 
To fix that, you'd have to implement a system where you get progressively higher penalties as you took more damage. 

[veekie]

There are many ways to do that, penalty as damage mounts is one, bonus as damage mounts is another(it works very well for conserving your big hits for the end of the fight, nice and dramatic), resources unfriendly towards repeat ability usage is also an option(ToB, no repeat readied maneuvers), BFC/non-crippling debuffs(crippling debuffs are a reflavored SoD), 'spin up' resource model where you gain the requirements needed for your more powerful moves as you progress through the encounter, etc.

Lots of ways to do it. Prepared spellcasters do it. Just martial characters are stuck with auto full attack without moving, and maybe a special move linked into their autoattack.

[oslecamo]

But in 3.5, the battle doesn't change from round to round, unless either someone dies or the wizard drops a Battlefield Control spell.  A creature is just as effective at 1HP as it is at 1000. 

A common misconception that couldn't be farther from the truth. If you're at 1 HP, you theoretically may be as effective as when you had 1000 HP, but quite in contrary you're suffering from multiple vulnerabilities:
-When you had 1000 HP you could just move around whitout fear of Aoos because you can shrug them off. Now a single lucky Aoo will drop you.
-When you had 1000 HP your opponent had to resort to stronger attacks to do anything you noticed. Now that you're at 1 HP they can just throw you an alchemist's fire and watch you drop, or finish you off whitout power attack, meaning their attacks are also more acurate.
-When you had 1000 HP you could walk trough that wall of fire and acid fog with little trouble. Now that you're at 1 HP that wall of fire means certain death if you get close.

And etc, etc. Being at 1 HP means being that much closer to death, meaning you suddenly have to worry about a lot more things.

To fix that, you'd have to implement a system where you get progressively higher penalties as you took more damage.

A common trap that only makes the game worst, as all it makes is the guy that gets hit first being reduced to an useless blob that can't fight back, so it takeseven more damage increasing the penalties more, meaning the fight ended right with the first blow and now you're just mopping up.

[linklord231]

But in 3.5, the battle doesn't change from round to round, unless either someone dies or the wizard drops a Battlefield Control spell.  A creature is just as effective at 1HP as it is at 1000. 

A common misconception that couldn't be farther from the truth. If you're at 1 HP, you theoretically may be as effective as when you had 1000 HP, but quite in contrary you're suffering from multiple vulnerabilities:
-When you had 1000 HP you could just move around whitout fear of Aoos because you can shrug them off. Now a single lucky Aoo will drop you.
-When you had 1000 HP your opponent had to resort to stronger attacks to do anything you noticed. Now that you're at 1 HP they can just throw you an alchemist's fire and watch you drop, or finish you off whitout power attack, meaning their attacks are also more acurate.
-When you had 1000 HP you could walk trough that wall of fire and acid fog with little trouble. Now that you're at 1 HP that wall of fire means certain death if you get close.

And etc, etc. Being at 1 HP means being that much closer to death, meaning you suddenly have to worry about a lot more things.

None of which matters by that point anyway, because any melee worth his salt will already be in combat by the time he's at 1 HP, and has ways to stay that way until the thing he's fighting is dead.  You don't need to worry about tactical movement once you're in position, Rocket Tag says that you're always at the edge of death regardless of how much HP you have, and again, you don't need to worry about moving through BFC spells if you're already in position.

To fix that, you'd have to implement a system where you get progressively higher penalties as you took more damage.

A common trap that only makes the game worst, as all it makes is the guy that gets hit first being reduced to an useless blob that can't fight back, so it takeseven more damage increasing the penalties more, meaning the fight ended right with the first blow and now you're just mopping up.

That's a problem with the implementation, not the system itself.  Just scale it so that the penalties aren't crippling.  And really, is what you described any different than the Rocket Tag we have now?

[oslecamo]

None of which matters by that point anyway, because any melee worth his salt will already be in combat by the time he's at 1 HP, and has ways to stay that way until the thing he's fighting is dead.  You don't need to worry about tactical movement once you're in position, Rocket Tag says that you're always at the edge of death regardless of how much HP you have, and again, you don't need to worry about moving through BFC spells if you're already in position.

Because in D&D there's no teleports, tumble, or the guy with 1000 HP just moving away from you, shrugging off your aoo and then taunting you to eat aoos to aproach again?

And you just said it yourself. If the melee just had 1 HP to start with, he would've already dropped dead before reaching his target.

To fix that, you'd have to implement a system where you get progressively higher penalties as you took more damage.

A common trap that only makes the game worst, as all it makes is the guy that gets hit first being reduced to an useless blob that can't fight back, so it takeseven more damage increasing the penalties more, meaning the fight ended right with the first blow and now you're just mopping up.

That's a problem with the implementation, not the system itself.  Just scale it so that the penalties aren't crippling.  And really, is what you described any different than the Rocket Tag we have now?

It's diferent because if you have 1000 HP, then yes you're more resistant to rocket tag because very few things can hope to finish you in one blow with damage, and even if you're disabled you can shrugg off even coup-de-graces for a good while.

And it's easy to say "non-crippling penalties that matter", but then do tell, why does every system that tried to implement it ends up with PCs wanting to avoid combat more than ever?

Meanwhile, hundreds if not thousands of games out there do implement HP systems where debuffs are separate conditions and people love them.

An excellent example would be Magic the Gathering. 20 starting HP. Tecnically "only the last one matters". There's even lots of strategies around willingly sacrificing your own HP to gain certain advantages. But guess what? When you willingly dropped yourself to 1 HP, then your opponent can just drop a direct damage spell to easily finish you off, whereas wearing down 20 HP with just direct damage spells is drastically harder in MTG.

Similarly, in D&D it's much much easier to finish off someone at 1 HP than someone at 1000 HP. Yes, there's also ways to finish the 1000 HP guy in one blow, but dealing just 1 point of damage is far simpler and faster.

[Concerned Ninja Citizen]

An excellent example would be Magic the Gathering. 20 starting HP. Tecnically "only the last one matters". There's even lots of strategies around willingly sacrificing your own HP to gain certain advantages. But guess what? When you willingly dropped yourself to 1 HP, then your opponent can just drop a direct damage spell to easily finish you off, whereas wearing down 20 HP with just direct damage spells is drastically harder in MTG.

Interestingly, LP end up mattering a great deal more in multiplayer MTG. 1 on 1 you can predict pretty much what your opponent's damage output is going to be and, against some decks, stabilizing the board at 1 life can be downright safe.

When you add opponents, however, it becomes effectively impossible to predict and stabilize in the same way and 5 life becomes an entirely different strategic prospect from 20 life. This is why life gain is significantly more valuable in multiplayer.

This applies in a similar way to fights with multiple enemies in D&D.