I wanted to take this post to go over some of the (seemingly) more odd-ball mechanics that are in the game, and outline some of the thought processes behind them.
Combat Skills
One of the rule changes that came out of playtesting, was to limit each character to one skill check per turn. The reason for doing this ties into how the mechanics behind intimidation work.
The baseline rule that I came up with was that you can intimidate an immobilized enemy into surrendering; this causes them to be "dropped" and therefore removed from combat. The rationale for this was that I wanted a mechanic whereby the enemy has to be in a vulnerable position before they'd consider surrendering (from a narrative standpoint) but also mechanically, I didn't want it to completely invalidate combat.
The problem cropped up with classes that either get to make grapple or intimidate checks as a minor action (since grappling is the main way to immobilize an enemy.) This creates a scenario where, by succeeding on two checks on the same turn, a player can remove an enemy from combat without a fight. This doesn't really conform to the narrative intent, nor the mechanical assumption of fights typically lasting for three rounds.
To compensate for removing this combo, some classes were given the ability to intimidate enemies who are bloodied (or who are immobilized.) This keeps a feature like being able to intimidate as a minor action still useful, while also requiring the players to engage in the combat mechanics.
Similarly, elite monsters were made stronger, by requiring that they be both bloodied and immobilized before they can be intimidated into surrendering.
Inspiration & Restoration
I specifically went out of my way to not use the terminology of "healing" within the rules; rather, restoring HP is meant to be as abstract as possible.
It's generally accepted that HP itself is an abstraction, often combining wounds, stress, and the will to fight (among other things.) Using the terms "inspiring" or "inspiration" for most of the HP restoration mechanics serves to highlight the "will" part of the equation. It also makes it easier for non-magical/non-medical characters to have abilities that restore HP.
This brings me to another point: what is the role of "healing" within combat?
As mentioned before, since the earliest designs, there hasn't ever been much in the vein of "combat healing" in The Next Project. The idea behind spending reserves is that it should be a way of returning your HP to its maximum, once combat has concluded. This is more of a DM-side contrivance, because it then allows all encounters to be balanced around the assumption of "all PCs will be at max HP, at the start of every combat." (It should be noted that this is also true of 4th Edition D&D.)
The goal within combat is to simply survive until the end, at which time you are then safe to heal up. In-combat healing is meant to be about on-par with "striker"-level damage; it's something that helps the party to better survive until the end of the fight, while also being a mechanic which is in keeping with a particular play-style, but without being a further tax on limited resources (i.e. reserves.) This is one of the ways that healing operates differently from 4th Edition.
All that being said, HP is further abstracted in TNP by effectively folding the design concept of "temporary hit points" into it. The whole "not real hit points" distinction is sort of meaningless, in a concept already so abstract -- so we junked it. When you receive "healing" in combat, it is allowed to increase your HP above its maximum; any excess is lost at the end of the encounter, however. Likewise, spending reserves after combat cannot increase your HP above its maximum.
What this serves to do is functionally increase the times when it is "appropriate" for a support class to use their restoration ability. In 4th Edition, generally the right time was whenever an ally's HP was down below their surge value, since the standard "leader" heal was usually [surge value + an ability modifier, or 1d6]. Further to this, the "bloodied" mechanic being a condition which all combatants were aware of (once someone had that condition on them) was an effective way of signposting to the support characters, when someone needed to be healed.
Because of how TNP handles HP and in-combat healing, you may very well consider "inspiring" an ally before they have taken any damage, since they will still receive the extra HP (and it may very well make sense, if they're a class who you can expect to soak a lot of damage; if they don't end up taking the damage, it'll have been a waste of one of your actions, so choose carefully.) It also avoids the pitfalls of 5th Edition D&D, where the only time to restore someone's HP is when they're at zero (because damage so drastically outpaces healing, you really only use it to prevent death and/or loss of actions.)
Also, by going with the "once per ally" model for these abilities (akin to the Healer feat, in 5th Edition) rather than the "twice per encounter" model from 4th Edition, these abilities effectively scale to fit a party of any size. However, once a party's size exceeds the typical number of rounds a combat is expected to take, choosing who to heal (and when) suddenly becomes a tactical consideration once again. Overall, I think this framework allows for more interesting decision-making options for the healer "role" and I quite like that outcome.
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Check back April 24th for the next post!
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