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Let's start by paraphrasing Winston Churchill: hitpoints are the worst possible system for tracking health except all others that have been tried.

Hitpoints are terrible for verisimilitude and an awful reflection of reality. They’re also not particularly good at emulating cinematic combat.

This old argument has come up again and again (and again and again), most recently resurfacing on various message boards due to the continued warlord debates and the option of martial healing. This seems like a topical discussion to write about.

Are Hitpoints Fatigue or Health?

Yes.

And no. Here’s an amusing flowchart on the topic.

Jumping right into the debate, are hitpoints a measure of energy, fatigue, luck, and skill? No. No amount of skill can stop a fire from burning you, or acid

With the design of 5th edition still underway, I wanted to rant a little about the ability (or rather the current inability) to add PC classes to monsters. Being able to make an orc into an orc fighter is pretty vital to my enjoyment of the game, mostly because making a classed creature equates with the DM’s ability to make NPC opponents.

This is a topic with some baggage, which needs to be discussed and acknowledged: past attempts have led to preconceived assumptions of what mixing classes and monsters means.

What Has Come Before

Almost no monsters had classes in the first couple editions. You had monsters and you had PCs and the rules were sketchy when you tried to make an encounter with say human fighters or an evil necromancer. You could add classes to some humanoid monsters,

I was really excited by the creative design space offered by the 5e fighter’s expertise dice mechanic, but I was much more interested by the improvisational space it created. It was a fluid, flexible mechanic, a spendable yet rechargeable resource designed to be burned for varied combat actions. It was as simple as the player wanted it to be and changed depending on desired role: it kept damage off the tank, added damage to the brute, and could be used for mob control by the defender.

But there’s a problem. No sooner was it created but content and options were heaped on the character and the potential to improv was removed as room to stunt shrunk. Is this an issue? Maybe. It depends on the type of game you like. D&D has always been a very codified game with rules for everything

A term I keep hearing around the interwebs and on the message boards is "DM May I?" It's based around rules lite systems where there is less baked in PC options, and player must ask if they can do something. This is seen as a bad thing because of the risk of rigid DMs who won't let players do anything and will shoot down ideas. This is also because some players don't want to have to ask if they can do something – or have to think of actions – they just want to act.

I’ve also heard this referred to as “mother may I?” A term that seems deliberately inflammatory, designed to provoke a negative emotional reaction and thus establish without argument that the style is bad. So I’m sticking to “DM”.

No two gaming groups play D&D exactly alike. There

I kinda want to kill a Player Character. But I'm finding it difficult to justify doing so...

I wrote about this once before in a very, very early blog but that piece is significantly rougher, and it's a different from the position I now find myself in. My forthcoming campaign is a horror game. I'm doing a Ravenloft campaign and my players are going to be everymen. They're little more than 0-level NPCs and definitely not heroes. I want them to be afraid of death, which means death has to be a real possibility. Therein lies the problem.

The Paradox

I want death to string and be more real: no resurrection magic and no punches pulled. I want to be fair yet mean, so if the Player Character makes a mistake it might very well cost them their life, just like making a bad call in a horror

There was a lot of responses to my piece of sexism in D&D art, published last week.  People responded in the comments, my inbox, and on twitter.

One of the more frequent counterpoints was that cheesecake art was a part of the history of the game and a convention of the genre, that D&D has always had the cheesecake art and underlying tone of sex. Which implies the two are one and the same, that you cannot have D&D without the thin piecrust of sexism and objectification lurking underneath. Or that by making D&D sexless you’d be removing some subtle or ineffable part of the game.

I disagree. Completely.

Condemn Not Condone

The American South had a long history of oppression and racism. Plantations and humans as property were such a large part of the culture and it was difficult

Here I go: throwing my hat into a ring that I probably shouldn’t; this blog was inspired by the continued debates over stat limits set by biological sex and art in the D&D books.

I hesitated over this blog for a long, long time and have delayed it five or six times, to really think and rethink what I want to say. On the one hand, I’m not exactly a discriminated minority being a straight white male with no physical or mental handicaps, aside from being slightly overweight and my propensity to sit in a basement with likeminded friends rolling plastic polyhedrons while pretending to be a wizard. And while some might argue that the “overweight nerd” is an oppressed minority throughout high school, I do not think this even remotely compares.

I almost trashed this blog

We have our first open look at 5th Edition. Have we all absorbed the rules? Good. Has everyone had themselves to position themselves staunchly in a “for” or “against” faction? Okay then. Let’s get started with another review ‘n’ assessment. Be warned, it's a long one. Grandpa Jester likes to ramble, he does.

Definition of Terms

I’ll be using “5th Edition” and “5e” in this blog for a couple reasons. Mostly because 5e is 2 characters and “D&D Next” is 7 (and a space). And while “D&D Next” is a good temporary name it is a terrible official name: what happens when they need to release another edition? Or – heaven forbid – an update or revision?

They can’t just call it “Dungeons

Rumour has it that the Great Wheel is returning with 5th Edition. Which likely means much of the 4e cosmology is being removed or rethought.

That sounds like a blog topic to me.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Of all the changes that came with 4e, I felt the most torn with the planar restructuring. On the one hand, the planes were a little crazy and busy, with so many overlapping ideas and places with only a single tenuous hook. There were many planes whose sole existence was to serve as a bridge from one interesting location to the other. They needed a change.

On the other hand, the original planes were pure High Gygaxian and contained story hooks and idea that dated back to Jeff Grubb’s first Manual of the Planes back in 1987, or the first Deities & Demigods from 1980-81. A classic part of