The question has come up on a few forums since Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition debuted: Can it do a gritty, grim style of fantasy adventure? Can it handle adaptations to something less overtly heroic and colorful than the D&D world implied by the power descriptions and artwork?
My gut says, “Yes, it can.” The trouble is this: What does gritty mean?
A bunch of the posts I’ve read seem to think that the secret to making D&D “gritty” is to limit the amount of healing characters can do through healing surges. This seems to miss out on one of the key purposes for having healing in the game as it is: so you can keep playing. I’ll grant that grittier stories are usually meaner to their characters, but punishing the player isn’t the way to do that.
As it is, nasty challenges and deadly battles can be modeled in D&D by simply pitting the characters against nastier, deadlier foes. The PC anti-heroes should be always the underdogs, always facing off against foes who are as tough or tougher, always waist-deep in a dangerous world. But the game’s still got to be fun, right? So don’t hinder the character—just make the encounters meaner. In D&D 4E, this is easy to do: make them higher-level encounters.
But I say grit has more to do with how you tell your tale than whatever data the game gives you outright. It’s about interpreting the game mechanisms in a way that’s darker, or even just less romanticized. It’s more about doling thematically appropriate magic items than it is about redefining the magic rules outright. That kind of major house-ruling is a valid part of world-building, but it’s separate from genre.
In D&D terms, bloodied simply means “at half hit points.” You have a lot of freedom, as a DM and players, to characterize that during play.
“Bloodied” can be…
The ache in your muscles says you may have underestimated this hobgoblin chieftain, but you keep hope in your heart. The huddled villagers in the valley below, awaiting the arrival of this ignoble beast’s dreaded army, are counting on you. Hoisting your sword high, you know you will not let them down! “You fight well, creature,” you say, “but for the wrong lord.”
Or it can be…
The sight of your blood oozing out from between your teeth, falling in thick drabs on your armor, makes some part of you, inside the armor where you aim the drink and the whores, ready to give up. You feel the gash in your hip dribbling blood down the inside of your leg and you feel like you need to piss. Here, your weight on your sword, tip dug down into the mud, you think maybe you’ve done your part already. People die—that’s the way of it. If you die now, that doesn’t mean the villagers will live. But when you look sideways through your sweaty hair at that green-skinned bastard and his smile—he thinks you’re almost out of it, too—you taste bile in your mouth. So the villagers live or they die. This sorry subhuman creature doesn’t get to step over your corpse. You hoist your sword onto your shoulder. You say, “Stop smiling, shit-hound. You’re not going to like what comes next.”
You have a lot of control over the tone of your game without having to change a single rule.
I’m all for color — the problem I suspect most of the gritty folks are having is healing surges and the effect they actually have on play.
With an short rest and a few surges, all those wounds you elaborately described in your “gritty” example are gone. There’s NO magical healing involved, that’s just a 5 minute breather. Even if you continue to describe the character as battered and bruised, will that actually affect how the players react?
While I expect I’ll just embrace the 4e superhero mentality in a game I run, I have given some thoughts to how I’d rebuild hit points to be more gritty. Specifically, I’d probably go with something like SOTC or Ars Magica’s graduated damage mechanic, where eventually you have dire wounds inflicted that you can’t just shrug off and that are difficult to heal.
In SOTC, first you have stress boxes (hit points that refresh after a fight), then three wounds (each more difficult to heal than the last), then you are taken out — at the mercy of your opponent, so he either killed you or took you captive, or whatever.
In D&D, I’d probably make those wounds conditions that could only be removed with a ritual. So “mangled” might mean you are dazed and slowed until you get a few weeks of rest or a powerful healing ritual cast on you.
“You have a lot of control over the tone of your game without having to change a single rule.”
Well said. And as for wounds miraculously disappearing with healing surges, they’re just not being thought of in the right way. Consider a character’s true health to be equal to HP + HealSurge# x HealSurgeValue. A character is clobbered if he gets knocked out in a fight, effectively taking a good percentage of his total health in wounds in a short period of time. Just because he renews his energy for the next fight after a short rest doesn’t mean the blood has gone away. His overall vitality for the day has been depleted until he can fully rest, so the visible marks of those wounds stay.
Then there is the comment about wounds disappearing after a night’s rest. This can limit the grittiness in some ways, but thanks to healing surges, a quest can be completed without a night’s rest. A single day’s trek through dozens of encounters where the heroes take beating after beating with all of those wounds piling up in the flavor text seems pretty gritty to me. Consider Die Hard.
Part of ‘grit’ to me is a rarity of supernatural opponents and an intrinsic inability to win against them. Simply put ‘grit’ is based on the horror and low fantasy genres, not High Fantasy D&D out of the books, be thouse books OD&D, 2nd, 3.5 or 4th.
That said, there where gritty D20 rulesets, mongooses Conan comes to mind as pretty gritty, and if it could be done with 3.5 I see no reason why 4th cannot be made gritty.
Codrus, you can’t force a gritty style of play on players—that’s not genre or atmosphere or tone, if they’re not involved. Characters in gritty stories are often not happy to be there, but your players must be happy to be there if your game’s going to carry on, right? They have to be a part of the tone of the game, not just witness to it.
Hit points are still a tremendous abstraction. Do healing surges mean that your character heals those wounds? Or simply that she’s willing to go on fighting despite them. Part of the point of my examples is that the wounds dealt are subjective; the issue is how close the character is to giving up the fight, even if he’s beaten and battered.
If a lasting-injury system is needed, I think ritual magic is probably a fine way of dealing with it. I wouldn’t impose such a thing, though, until a character is dropped to 0 hit points or fewer (even if a healing surge or whatever pulls him out of it).
What’s the goal of a gritty style of play, though? I think “gritty” is used to describe too many goals, across purposes. For me, it’s a narrative style.
What does gritty mean to you?
Consider Die Hard.
Damn right, Benjamin. Damn right.
Die Hard indeed. Right on, Benjamin.
Well, you “can” make any game sound gritty with enough description changes. But rules can make it more or less conducive to that.
Imagine a game where according to the rules “the heroes never get wounded or die!” Well, you could still narrate that “grittily” and still have the visuals of lots of Die Hard style wounds. But the fact is, they’re not really there, and the disjoint between the description and the model of the game world will chafe on the players. “Is he really wounded or fake wounded?”
It’s the same thing with 4e and all wounds healing overnight. Sure, you can pretend they don’t, and describe them not, but color commentary can wear thin when the game reality doesn’t back it up. There’s a certain expectation that descriptions will correlate to the rules in the same way that IRL visuals are based on the physical facts of something.
So I’d probably end up using another game system entirely, or house-ruling 4e so much it’s not 4e any more, to go “gritty.” Like Feng Shui – you could make a gritty game with its core mechanics, but it is a game tuned to be high action not high grit.
That’s a great point, and you’re certainly right that description should correlate to game “facts” in a meaningful way (though I take issue with the notion that description is merely “color commentary”).
My experience with 4E suggests a couple of things you can tie your description to and keep things meaningful:
• Healing Surges. These, as much or more than hit points, impact how close your character is to death. It can be tricky to know, though, whether a healing surge is going to come along in time to save a character. The current power mechanisms, though, mean that a savvy DM can know how many healing surges are in play in any given encounter by counting up available Second Winds and healing powers, for what that’s worth.
• High-powered enemies. D&D 4E is plenty deadly when the characters face tough foes. If we are, apparently, deciding that gritty = deadly, then a DM just has to make sure to keep really dangerous foes within reach all the time. Even then, though, death is more likely to happen because of a sudden loss of lots of hit points, followed by the Death Save Spiral. Sudden death can be gritty, but I have seen lots of evidence that, outside of one-shot games, it is seldom fun.
I don’t think “gritty” maps exactly to “deadly,” or really just “throwing tougher opponents at the PCs.” Sure, you can figure out what kind of resources they have and overwhelm them. But I’m not sure that the games I’ve played in that I’ve considered gritty specifically mapped to “killer.” I think high-magic high-power games where people get killed a lot and raised a lot are not gritty, which is where this train ends with D&D – again, unless you specifically alter it a bunch. I ran a gritty 2e D&D campaign via a number of means, like for example the campaign ran five years (weekly) and people only got to ninth level… With 2e, if you just avoided higher levels you could keep it gritty but with 4e I think that all levels are difficult to handle.
One of the hallmarks of grittiness is scarcity, largely across the board. Scarce allies, scarce equipment, scarce personal resources (hit points/stats/etc). Midnight, Thieves’ World, etc. The higher the power level the hard it is to be gritty even if the opponents are also powerful.
One of the hallmarks of grittiness is scarcity…
I think you hit it right on the head, here.
And if that’s true, the very fact of an equipment list with fixed prices spins things in the wrong direction.
Yes (well, not so much the normal-stuff list, but definitely the magic-item list).
I thought 3e was a huge improvement over 2e in every way but one – that crafting magic items was now so super-easy. Now, it was retarded that in 1e/2e you couldn’t ever make magic stuff, that all these magic items and Tombs of Horrors and whatnot were basically products of non-PC-obtainable magic. So having something to that effect was good. But the ease of crafting turned it into the magic-Christmas-tree syndrome. They did have the settlement rules with max gp values available to buy and all, which was nice, but availability was artificially high.
Seems mostly the same in 4e – the prices are jacked up and they’ve put int he stupid “20% sale price” rule, basically raping simulationism to try to correct the problem – but grittiness is often synonymous with simulationism.
I’d prefer going to a much more restrictive model, where magic is rare and crafting it is hard – especially in time, which is one of the biggest ways to dissuade PCs from doing it. (Heck, with my 3e wizards I have trouble restraining the rest of the party to wait a week before dashing off to the next non-time-sensitive leg of the adventure).
Scarcity for the win, sir. Great point.
That’s part of the point of tougher enemies contributing to 4E grittiness, though: Tough enemies make hit points feel scarce. That’s much easier, to me, than trying to reinvent the hit point system.
You know, I think part of the issue is that I assume D&D will be rigged a certain amount in one direction or another by every DM to fit the game world she has in mind. I feel like there’s an implicit under-argument here that supposes that tweaking magic-item availability, for example, moves D&D so far outside of its D&D-ness that it no longer gets credit for doing what it’s doing. I don’t agree — I downgrade the availability of magic in every D&D campaign, thus far, to get something a little more wondrous and dare I say gritty, and I think that’s evidence that D&D can do that. I suppose it’s equally evidence that, since I made the tweak, D&D can’t do that. Whatever.
There’s an assumption, among some players I know, that you can’t really adapt D&D to styles of play without laying on house rules. Often, I think this leads to too many house rules, and a dependence on them to validate style. Some folks just want to tweak the rules, sometimes. That’s fine. But I see the fact that the game can be tweaked easily as evidence that it can change styles — like any edition of D&D has been able to do — not evidence that it can’t.
If that makes any sense.
To an extent I agree; but as D&D becomes a bigger and bigger complex and interconnected ruleset it becomes harder to tweak just one part of it. For example, it’s a “well known problem” in 3.5 that you can’t mess with magic item availability without throwing off the CR/EL system as well, because the availability of items is so integral to the performance of high level characters. So if you go lower magic, and then you use a published adventure or Adventure Path, you have to make more and more rippling changes to the ruleset to accommodate it.
With enough work you can take any game and manipulate it via rules and flavor text to emulate something else. But really that’s like taking a pair of pliers and using it as a screwdriver – you can do it, but it’s harder and you get suboptimal results. In my opinion doing that with D&D 4e goes outside the bounds of “worth the work” when many other games exist that are much, much more conducive to grittiness. In fact, through 3.5e I’d say you could do horror with D&D decently; in 4e that’s pretty much out the window as well, unless you can keep everything “out of combat” the whole time.