Mercurius said:
If you dislike healing surges, why? And what would your solution be?
I don't have particularly strong feelings about them one way or the other, but there is something that they dramatically affect: adventure pacing.
The mechanic of "restore to full HP using surges after an encounter" changes what effect HPs have on gameplay. HPs become not about how long you can endure a dungeon crawl (which is what they were about before), but about how tough of an
encounter you can take. The shift is instant and dramatic, and focuses intensely on the encounter, rather than the adventure/dungeon itself. The encounter is what will kill you. The encounter is what will drain you. The encounter is what challenges you. A dungeon or an adventure is just a backdrop for a series of encounters that drain your HPs, spaced out by places where you can spend your surges.
I think this shift to the encounter is overall a negative shift in D&D. Healing Surges are not the whole bag, but they're a big part of it.
There's a disconnect with earlier editions where "full HP" meant that you were at full strength, and now, it might not mean that -- it just means you're able to take One Encounter before healing again (using surges). It's dissonant for newbies, too: I'm at full health, but I'm down half my surges....exactly what kind of condition am I in? How do I make sense of that in the narrative of the game? It's not something 4eD&D provides a lot of guidance for.
I think you could easily have mechanics that let PCs heal themselves without using surges. Potions work if you make them mostly "mundane," or you could do a Heal check restoring HP, or the Second Wind, or even going "Full Defense" for a round (and having that recover a bit of HP, as you are bandaging and tending to your wounds). Surges aren't necessary to have characters heal themselves.
I think I'd keep surges around, if I were doing a game. The first thing I would do with them is describe them better in story terms: this is your endurance, your grit, your determination, your willpower, your ability to power through. You HP's are only a snapshot of your overall health, your Surges define how beat up or healthy you are. I would also expand their definition so its not just HP that they recover. They might recover HP, or they might give you back a spell, or they might be used to activate a ritual. They'd be spent pro-actively as well as re-actively, giving the resource management aspect of D&D more prominence. I think that would help the party to focus more on when they need to take extended rests. Then I'd link Bad Things Happening to each extended rest.