Milestone Recovery, my houserules

My latest houserule is as follows:

For every two combat encounters played through the players receive 1 Milestone. A Milestone can be spent to recover your level in hit points, heal 1 point of ability damage to every stat, and to recover 1/4 (rounded down) of daily abilities. Spells recovered are spell that you have already used and you do not get to select new spells. You can not go over what you would normally have and any going over your normal allotment is lost. The exception is spells. If you would recover a spell slot, you may choose to recover a lower level spell slot instead.

You may spend two Milestones to recover twice your hit points, heal 2 points of ability damage, and recover 1/2 (rounded down) of your daily abilities. Four Milestones recovers four times your hit points, 4 points of ability damage and all your daily abilities.

Milestones can be spent at any time. This includes in combat during another persons turn. For example, say that you are struck and reduced to -12 hit points. You may spend a Milestone and gain enough hit points to survivce. Or say that you are at -3 and stable for several rounds and you decide that you need to get back up. You can spend a Milestone, instantly heal and be ready to fight again.

Pros: This reduces the need for players to constantly retreat and rest. Many plots can be undermined by the players constantly being forced to leave and rest. Any kind of plot with urgency that involves multiple enocunters benefits greatly from this 'resting without resting' idea. Or any kind of plot that involves the players surviving some kind of gauntlet also benefits. It also gives the players more options and the ability to pull out more resources when needed. This system also doesn't sacrifice the whole resource management aspect of the game, just extends it.

Cons: The gives the players an extra reward for fighting encounters and may steer players towards fighting more battles that they could have otherwise avoided. Instead of confronting the enemy they might run back to a room of minions in order to get a Milestone. It also introduces the idea of fighting more battles in order to recover a specific needed ability. For example, the players teleport into a dungeon, fight some bad guy, but then need to fight more encounters to get the teleport spell back so they can leave. Also, players can do more out of combat type spells if they are fighting that day and that is a little weird. Being able to identify more items because you had several fights is odd.

The future: I initially envisioned this as getting 4 milestones every 4 encounters, but in making these rules I wanted to apply to 4th edition also where you might run more encounters. I also wanted it to be possible for players to run out of resources despite the Milestones even though it would be much harder. So I think I might change this to getting a 1/3 Milestone every 2 encounters which would be equivalent to a full rest every 6 encounters. The reason I started with a full rest every 8 encounters was to minimize any disruption to my game and get a sense of how this playtested.

Skill Points or a Bonus to Level

A long time ago at a gaming table far away, there were two kinds of systems. There was D&D which was thought of as a 'class' based system. Your abilities were defined by what class you were and howyou progressed through that class. In response to this rigidity there were 'skill' based systems. Skill based systems allowed you to buy whatever set of skills you wanted giving you more flexibility in terms of how you built your character. As game design evolved very few systems were completely class or skill based. D&D added 'proficiencies' and then in 3rd edition had a full-fledged point based skill system that was influenced by class.

The traits of a skill system were that you had a set of skill points that you could spend on skills and this skill spending was very separate from any kind of 'level' or 'class' notion. Third edition embraced this entirely although it gave a 'class' feel by giving different classes access to different sets of skills with out of class skills costing more. Fourth edition, however, took a step away from this system and became very level focussed. I think that one of the reasons for this was that skill selection was actually the most complex part of character creation. So in fourth edition you either have a skill or not. The growth of the skill is based on your level and not any points you decide to put in it.

So what is better, having a point system where characters can move around points and have greater flexibility or to have a flat bonus which is much simpler and requires less tracking. Well, let's take a quick look at how people spend their skills in 3rd edition. Most simple choose a set of skills and keep those at the maximum possible. Typically spreading out leads to situations where your skill can not really keep up and be meaningful. Skill difficulty rolls tend to be geared towards a character that has maxed out his skill. Also since many skills are used by the party as a whole, like a knowledge skill or a search skill, the only useful skill will be the highest one in the party. Of course, many skills are individual based such as Concentration, Tumble, and Climb for example.

Another thing to consider is that in 3rd edition some skills have diminishing returns at high levels. For example, if you have 16 points in Tumble you can tumble past two opponents without having to roll. If you have 23 points in Concentration you can defensively cast any spells. Appraisal is another example. But some skills require extremely high levels in order to be useful and don't have much use if you only have a few points, notably Use Magic Device.

So one thing that should be mentioned when talking about skills is rogues. First and second edition D&D mainly had the rogue as a utility character that dealt with dungeon hazards like traps and locks. They were the only ones that posessed several key skills. One unforunate thing is these editions was that they sucked at these skills at low levels and when they started to get good at them they were far surpassed by simple spells. In 3rd edition, with a full skill system rogues became the 'skill' characters (whereas wizards and clerics were spell characters and fighters were feat characters). Now rogues have evolved. Sneak attack can make them a potentially powerful role in combat. Rogues changed from a character focussed on dungeon hazards to a damage dealing role since many of the skills they have became less of a focus. Locked doors could be chopped down with an admantium axe or opened with a knock spell. Stealth was best achieved through spells. Although not D&D, I remember playing Neverwinter Nights as a rogue with my friend playing a barbarian. It took too long to deal with traps so they barbarian would just run through them all and them rest on the other side.

Anyway, most of my posts here have always sided on the side increased flexibility, but in this case I think I might lean towards either having a skill or not with no skill points. I used to love skill points because you could use them to customize your character, and I still feel that skill selection should be a part of your character development, but there are many other factors that give you much more power to customize your character. And frankly I feel that the headache of counting skill points outweighs the benefits of having fine control of your skills since most people just max out their skills.

Ok, so some quick problems with the 4th edition skill system are that picking up new skills becomes much harder and so does picking up new languages. The way 4th edition handled this was to make new skill acquisition and new language acquisition based on feats. The issue with this is that for the most part you will want to use your feats for other things. It is true that 4th edition feats tend to be much less powerful than 3rd edition feats, but I suspect that feats will climb in power as splat books come out and few characters will want to use them for feat acquistion.

XP Based on Level, a Failed Experiment

So one thing that 3rd edition introduced that was completely new was experience point bonuses based on the comparison of your level to the difficultly of foes you defeated. Both 3.75 and 4.0 both did away with it.

The reason it was introduced was because they wanted to give you an extra big reward for defeating things higher than your level and reduce the award for fighting weak things. Well the end effect was the same as having higher level monsters worth more and lower level monsters worth less and having sucessive levels take lots more experience.

One additional effect that some people liked was that a certain level of foe awarded no experience. So characters couldn't slaughter a herd of pigs to gain levels. Of course, this wasn't really a problem (like it would be in a MMORPG). DMs decide when and where to give experience. If a battle is completely one sided it should not be run as an encounter and if it is not run as an encounter you should not get XP. It should be handwaved away. For example, "On the road to Camelot, you encounter a handful of brigands, but hey have neither the skill nor equipment to challenge you and you disperse them with ease." Or perhaps, "Your band finds the orc village and demolishes it. The battle is so easy for you that you gain nothing from it but a handful of coins."

This shows one of the dangers of treating a pen & paper game too much like an MMORPG. You introduce unneeded complexity that is only necessary for an MMORPG that could easily handle the complexity behind the scenes.

Milestones in 3rd Edition, a Quick Fix

Okay, 3rd edition resource management is geared to have 4 meaningful encounters before being forced to rest. But guess what, a lot of times this shits on your plot. You have some sort of dramatic situation like saving a princess before she is sacrificed, but the players fight 4 encounters before the final battle to defeat the badguy and save the princess. So they leave to rest or they get their asses handed to tham because they have nothing left...

Well, since the game is geared to having 4 encounters then a rest, one solution is to give the players a free rest if they complete 4 encounters without forcing them to actually rest within the game story. Of course, this would get a little weird since battle #4 would be fought with very few resources and battle #5 would be fought with full power. But it is easy to even things out.

Ok, so here is the idea. Every encounter they earn a Milestone. Each milestone can be spent to recover 1/4 (rounded down) of the resources they would get from sleeping. Two milestones could get you 1/2 (rounded down) and 4 Milestones could give you full recovery. You could also spend those Milestones within a combat, maybe to save yourself. This would help alleviate the problem I mentioned in the previous paragraph since people would be spending Milestones in an uneven way.

One issue with this is spells. How do you handle clerics and wizards and those that have to choose a set of spells at the beginning of the day? Well one option is to allow them to choose any spells they could normally choose when resting. Another option is to only allow them to recover spells that they used. A third is to allow them to have any spell that they had memorized. The difference between the last two options is that if a wizard has a fireball memorized and has not yet cast he could not get another fireball in the first case, but could in the second.

So if you allowed in combat spending of Milestones there would be a danger. Spell selection is often a time-consuming process and high-level casters going through their list or even going through a pile of splatbooks to find the right spell for a situation could kill the pace of combat. But the idea of suddenly marshalling your resources and getting a few hit points back instead of dying or suddenly pulling a needed spell out in a dire situation does seem cool. So you could place limits on the selection such as the second option I mentioned above.

So one interesting question is do you allow them to go over? If a character has 4-4 spells and they use them up so that they have 3-1 and they then spend 2 Milestones do they go to 4-3 or 5-3? If you allowed this they would potentially be able to save up a lot spells and then go crazy in some battles. But is this really against what casters do anyway? It just extends it. Personally I would allow it only I playtested this system a little more...

Okay, a quick summary of what you get when you rest:
-You heal your level in hit points
-You heal 1 ability damage to each stat
-You regain your spells
-You regain any abilities with daily uses (like Barbarian Rage)

Save versus Attack Roll

One very interesting thing they did in 4th edition was to remove 'saving throws' and replace them with stat based attack rolls. So in 3rd you are comparing 1d20 + Base Save (as determined by class levels) + Stat Bonus + Random Feat and Magical Bonuses to 10 + Level Based Difficulty (spell level or half HD, actual very similar) + Stat Bonus + Feats and Magical Bonuses. So each factor has something on the other side that corresponds so you have the typical 1d20 > 10 roll. So instead of having the defender roll the 50% to be affected (with all other things being equal) you have the attacked do it. So to have the 4th edition attack roll behavior you add 10 to each saving throw, call it a defense and subtract 10 from every DC and have the attacker roll d20 and add in the DC.

One reason people might not like this is because it takes away the rolling of the dice. Players tend to like to roll dice. It gives them a feeling of involvement. When I GMed Champions we had many attacks that did around 10d6 damage. It became time-consuming counting up those dice and that was one major factor slowing down combat. So I made a handy little dice rolling application to speed the game, but my players weren't into it. They wanted to roll dice because it made them feel like they were in control of their fate. Most players attribute their rolls to either themselves or their dice and rarely to random probability. "I can't hit this guy!" "This die fails every time I need to make a save!" It sounds silly, but imagine playing the games craps where instead of rolling the dice you just read a display. It would be a very different experience and it would take away the illusion of control.

So if players like rolling dice and converting between +10 and +1d20 is easy you could easily switch to a system where players rolled all the dice. When they attacked they would roll an attack roll. When they were attacked by a monster they would roll a defense roll. When casting a spell they would roll a spell attack roll when being hit with one they would roll a save. The problem, you have to track player numbers and monster numbers in a slightly different way. But these numbers don't actually mix too much. A player tracks the numbers on his character sheet and a DM tracks numbers on monster statistics. Conversion is ridiculously simple since it is just subtract ten and add a d20 or vice versa.

One additional advantage I see to this is action points and die manipulation abilities. If you have action points that add a d6 to a roll or some luck ability that allows you to reroll then this allows those powers to be much more flexible.

PROS:
-Greater feeling of control
-Greater power and flexibility for 'die manipulation' type abilities

CONS:
-Two different ways to handle players versus monsters

So I guess this comes down to how hard it is to convert between adding 10 and adding d20. I don't think it would be much of an issue, because it happens when you are figuring out what to write down on your character sheet. If you got to rewrite the rules you could phrase things in terms of everything being an opposed roll where you add a bonus. Then, when you make the roll players add a d20 and monsters add 10.

Keeping Track of Things

Information can be stored in many ways and how you handle it is based on how you are going to use it. So in 3rd edition D&D you have basically 6 important numbers that you need to track. Your Armor Class, your three saves, you bonus to hit, and your damage. There are lots of ways to write this information down on your character sheet, and I've come across a few that I like that make things go easier.

First, I think breaking down a bonus is a good idea. It is always good to know what factors make your AC 24. THis will allow you to easily know how other factors will affect you. Does the +4 Deflection bonus from a spell add a full +4. You can search for what items you have that are affecting your AC or you could just check your AC line. So here is some possible AC information

AC: 25 (+1 Size, +4 Dex (+6 Limited by Armor), +2 Deflection from Magic Ring, +7 Magical Armor, +1 Natural Armor from Magical Necklace)

This makes it easy to see how other factors can affect your AC. Also you can put in things that may not affect your AC, but would if other factors changed. For example, say you have +3 Chain Mail and Bracers of Armor +3. The amor wouldn't help against Incorporeal attacks, but the bracers would. Another issue is named bonuses, you can explicitly say what bonuses have what names which makes stacking determinations easier. If you have all these factors listed out it is easier to see what your AC will be at any point. The same thing can be done with saves, and saves tend to be simpler.

I like to do hit and damage a little differently. I like the table design with each row being a different weapon and the columns being, Hit Bonus, Damage, Critical Info, and so on. I would probably add a 'break down' column to break down the hit and damage bonuses like I mentioned above for AC.

I used this (without the breakdown) for a long time. But I had a Dragonbane weapon, so I added another row for my main weapon that was "--Versus Dragons" so I didn't need to refigure things all the time. This was a really good strategy and I used this line of my table a lot more than a line for my backup handaxe or bow. So it is also good for people with options. For example, adding a line for "--Smiting" is useful. Or maybe you sometimes use a weapon one-handed or two-handed. If you have Power Attack you might want to put down your favorite power attack choices. If you regularly get certain magical buffs you might want to have a line that represents your bonuses when you have that buff. You could go overboard and you don't really want a huge table that you have to scroll through, but a mid or high level character should probably have at least 5 lines that represent the most common attack scenarios. This will reduce the math you have to do each time you attack and can help speed up the game.

Anyway, the general idea is that you want to arrange your characters information in such a way that it makes play easy. Doing this can make managing your character much easier. Remember that it is fine to repeat information in multiple places as long as things are clear and you prevent conflicting information.

Golden Ratio

No, I don't mean (a+b)/a=a/b. I mean the ratio of how many hit points a character has versus how much damage is done versus how much healing is done per round. You could think of this on a party basis or on a character basis. For ease, let's call the three numbers, H (hit points), D (damage taken), and R (recovering hit points). Balancing these factors has a lot of impact on the feel of the game.

Okay, let's look at H versus D. If H is much higher than D you have combats that will go on a long time. If R is also high dropping something will be difficult since after a long time a combatant can easily heal up all that damage. So if H > D then R will have to go down and healing becomes less important. On the other hand if D is higher then combats will be fast and combatants will easily be dropped so R must compensate. This leads to very swingy combat where large heals are crucial so without steady healing combatants will drop like flies.

Okay, now let's compare D versus R. If R > D then you have a situation where healing can outpace damage. It becomes difficult to drop a foe so it must be possible to drop a foe before they can get healed. So the H has to go down. Conversely when D > R, healing essentially just slows down D and it is still a race to see how runs out of hit points first instead of who runs out of healing.

So H versus R isn't too complex. When H > R you have unimportant healers and when R > H you have important healers.

So one issue is in a battle, what resource are you draining? Are you trying to reduce the number of hit points of your foe, to consume all their healing, kill them between heals, or simply have your damage outperform their healing?

Another thing to consider is that these values H,D,R may be different for characters and monsters. For example, monsters may not have the ability to heal and will instead have high hit points while players would have this ability giving the players an edge.

Let's look quickly at World of Warcraft cause many of these ideas and represented in that game. In this game for the characters R >H, meaning that healing is very important. A character with no healer backing him will die fairly quickly. Characters die because they either run out of healing resources, die too fast to be healed, or when D >R and they simply take too much damage for the high levels of healing to match. For monsters it is different, monsters in WoW tend to not be able to heal and often have very high hit points. So it is a struggle to slowly grind down a huge pool of monster hit points while using healing to keep your characters alive.

So how does D&D work? How does it change over levels? How did they change things in 4th edition? Let's look at why characters die:
1) They run out of healing resources
2) They are killed between heals
3) They take damage until they die and heals are only able to slow this process down

Case #1: Running out of healing resources.
Theoretically, D&D is structured so that this is rarely a reason for dying. You should be able to fight 4 encounters and all resources are daily and not encounter resources. So the only time you are supposed to run out of healing resources is when you have used up a lot in previous battles. Now anyone who has actually played 3rd edition D&D at moderate to high levels knows that this really isn't true. Battles can often consume you healing resources. At low levels this happens because you have very limited healing resources and at high levels you often have to churn out so much healing that you can quickly exhaust what you can do. What will typically happen is that one battle won't consume all your healing resources, but enough so that further battles are difficult because you simply don't have those resources.

Case #2: Killed between heals.
Typically you have only one or two healer characters and they may not be able to heal you or reach you for a heal. A lot of damage or a tactical situation can easily make this a possibility. This is possible because D > H and characters often face foes that can kill them in just a few rounds.

Case#3: Damage Taken Outpaces Heals
This also happens, but as healing becomes powerful it typically combines with case #1. You use up all your most powerful heals and your weak heals can't keep up. This situation increases as you gain levels since your weak heals can't keep pace with enemy damage while your strong heals can easily keep up.

So how do you want characters to fail? Which of these situations should be claiming characters lives? Well, in past posts I have always wanted to choose flexibility, and this is no different. You want to have players die because of all three of these situations. So in a way D&D is doing okay, but here is one thing I would change. I would make healing resources more encounter based that would help eliminate the vast divergence between battles where you have plenty of healing resources and those where you don't. Actually weakening the in combat healing, but making it so that you didn't need to worry so much about conserving resources would be useful in my mind. But you also want daily based resources as well. A lot of this has been mulled over in previous posts. This way battles can be about running down or outpacing healing resources without crippling the parties abilities to continue after the battle.

So where did 4th edition go? Well, they made the observation that only a few characters could heal and healing ending up dominating their actions. Those who could do a decent job healing alos were forced to do nothing but heal. Wizards also seemed to feel that healing was not fun job. So they made everyone capable of healing and somewhat reduced the importance of healing. I have not gotten a chance yet to play much 4th edition so I can't really say for certain how healing plays out but I am guessing that it shifts people dying from case #2 to case #1. It is fairly easy to heal significant amounts, but no healing remotely compares to the high level healing of 3rd edition. But the number of heals is fairly limited. Each character can use a healing surge once. Leader characters can allow a sizeable increase in healing, but resource wise I am guessing they can not keep up with damage. So R goes down and D goes down as well. So it becomes more about grinding up hit points faster than the other guy then round to round super-heals.

So is this good? Well, yes if you want healing to take more of a backseat role. So if you feel like you want this the steps of reducing the power of healing as well as reducing the specialized role of healer is probably what you want to do.

Some other approaches to the reduction of the healing role were used in the game Age of Conan. You could make all healing something that a healer does only a few times in combat. Then they would be able to do other stuff. For example, a healer would cast his heal spell. For the next 3 rounds everybody would heal 10 points, but additional castings of this spell would do nothing. Another technique was tying healing to damage. Certain characters healed their allies in an amount based on the damage they did. Another possible technique is using the encounter based mana points I mentioned in a previous post. Healers couldn't heal every turn since some turns would be spent getting mana back. The only problem with this is that healers wouldn't be able to cast non-healing spells while regenerating mana for healing.