Red Box gaming via Skype

Sounds like it was fun. I’ll give it a listen.

You totally need to give me a call next time. I want to play, too!

That’s pretty sweet. I’m over 40 so that kind of tech seems like crazy magic. I was worried that the players would talk at the same time as the DM. But that happens in a regular D&D game. Sounds like fun.

Well, there is magical healing, which is typically how such things are handled in previous versions.

Of course this is a subjective thing, but many people are turned off by 4e because it has too many rules which interfere with verisimilitude. The “I’m nearly dead but I’ll be fine in the morning” is one of the major ones for many that I’ve talked to. 9 times out of 10 you’re going to have a cleric or healing magic around anyway. But if you don’t, at least with a somewhat realistic natural healing rule you can model fiction in which a character is seriously injured. In 4e, this sort of fiction is impossible to model, which strains credulity for many.

I say this as a 4e player and a Basic D&D player, and believe me, I am not into simulation in my RPGs. I’m more into the narrative, and modeling fiction. There are plenty of times in fiction that a character has to rest a few days to heal a particularly serious wound, and this sometimes has a significant impact on the story. If this were done in game it would normally happen “off camera” anyway (between sessions, or when narrating the passage of a few weeks).

Just MHO.

I’ve only ever played the Holmes Edition Basic D&D realtime (tabletop, back in 1979), but I ran a game of Moldvay BD&D play-by-post on a forum. Keep on the Borderlands was the module I used. I even used Photoshop on the Caves of Chaos, to drop a layer on top of the map, and only uncover what they had explored so far. They only got past the goblins, hobgoblins and kobolds before the game folded (pbp takes a LONG time to play!), but it was great fun, and everyone had only been playing 3.5e at that point, so it was a refreshing change for them.

Question, what whiteboard program did you use? I don’t regularly need all of the bells and whistles on something like Masterplan, due to a lack of time to prepare, but something like a simple whiteboard might be right up my alley.

Fantastic! This will be most useful going forward.

Regarding a few comments of 1d3 hp per day being more realistic, or better able to model things, and 4e’s “I have 3 gaping wounds, but now poof I’m better after sleep”:

At least as far back as 1e AD&D, and probably further, it was explicitly stated in the books by gygax that hit points are not wounds, but a combination of luck, skill, endurance, toughness, etc.

4e’s assumption is that most deductions from hit points are not “gaping wounds”, and as such, you’re back to normal after resting. This is in line with the stated assumption. (This is also why psychic attacks do psychic damage to your hit points, etc.)

1d3 hit points per full day of bed rest indicates that the hits you took really were severe. If your 10-hit-point fighter is laid up for a week to get back 9 hit points, those were some major injuries.

Not only is this contrary to the stated assumptions of the game, it’s contrary to the world D&D is set in. In this sort of era, a wound as major as that would likely kill you, and at least end your adventuring career.

So yeah, I have to agree with NewbieDM. It is a silly rule. It is less fun, less in line with stated assumptions, and actually LESS realistic than 4e.

If you’re going to invoke the name of Gygax to defend 4e (of all things), I’ll point out that AD&D 1st Ed featured a natural healing rule that was more draconian than the one in Basic D&D (1 HP per day recovered, until 30 days of rest had passed). Also, while it was mentioned in 1e that hit points represent skill and luck, it was also stated that a certain amount of these hit points represented the “actual physical punishment which can be sustained”.

The “gaping wounds” was merely an extreme example. There is a large middle ground in between “merely bruised” and “on my death bed” (at least in popular fantasy fiction, if not in reality).

A fictional world in which people hack at each other with wicked nasty blades for 5 minutes but never actually draw blood is what I would consider silly, personally. I don’t think the 4e designers intended that to be the case either. It’s pretty clear to me that the “bloodied” status is intended to indicate that someone has actually been wounded. Most of the 4e players I’ve come into contact with view “bloodied” the same way. (Where they differ, however, is how they explain away the “full healing after 8 hours” approach, but most of them just hand wave it as one of the many ways 4e prioritizes “fun” over verisimilitude.)

First level is tough in Basic D&D, because clerics don’t get spells until second level. I believe this is one of the places where Labyrinth Lord breaks from Basic D&D by giving a first level cleric one spell. I definitely agree that it blows to get unlucky rolls in the first fight in a dungeon and have to turn around and go home for two days…

My first D&D character was a Basic D&D Cleric. At first level he did have one healing spell. I remember because he used it on himself when bandits attacked the party on the way to the Caves of Chaos. Puny guy died anyway. Never having played anything beyond 1E, the healing rule seems appropriate to me, although I knew few parties that would ever go into action without at least one medic (ahem, I mean cleric) or a bunch of healing potions.

The game of D&D should be stripped down to the basics, with all the loopholes filled in by on the fly rulings. The reason I say this is that the latest edition of D&D seems to be more like a paper and pen version of an online MMO, rather than the light and fun game that is should be.

I hear the GM give out weapons, spellbooks and max gold, this will again take away from the fun of the game by not making it hard on the characters when they adventure in these ‘old school’ rules. Try making things hard for characters, make them pay for everything they buy, dont assume anything because this takes away from good role playing.

Thanks guys for this. I am trying to get back into paper & pencil RPGing, and after this I definitely want to look for a Skype game. I wasn’t sure before, but your experience took me back to the days I want to relive and showed me that it is possible. Thanks again, and beware of short hairy women offering beer……..

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