Healing Surges innate Blessed band aids

Primal said:

I think his main point was that when a PC falls to negative HPs, nobody, DM included, can predict whether he's just momentarily unconscious or dying. The fact is, in 4E you just become "unable to fight" and fall prone, but the DM cannot describe the effects of the last blow or the PC's condition in any way until those "recovery rolls" are done with.

Click to expand...

Yes you can. The character is hit by a spear and his goes negative. You describe "the spear is buried into your belly and you faint in pain with blood splitting out". He rolls 20, come back and use a second wind to recover some HPS. The player describes "The wound stops bleeding, I catch my breath and forgo the pain, get up and keep fighting". The wound is still there. Taking a second wind does not instantly and magically heal the wound, it just allows the character to stop being affected by it.

For example, the effect would be laughable if you described how a blow leaves a character with "his guts spilling out", but he rolls a natural 20 on his next rounds recovery roll ("Guys, I'm just fine! A bit bloodied, but no lasting wounds!").

Click to expand...

"Guts spilling out" is very drastic and would be almost a killing blow. Anyway, using a second wind does not mean the guts came back in and the wound is gone. It means the effects of the wound are not affecting the character so much anymore. If you need a description for that: The character puts his guts back in, ties a strap around the waist to hold'em and keep fighting". That's very heroic IMO, maybe too much "unbeliaveble" in real world, but it's "believable" enough for D&D.

Especially as he only needs to rest for 6 hours to get to "full health" -- quite a feat if he's innards were hanging out.

Click to expand...

Hit Points have nothing to do with how healthy your character is. After an extended rest, the character recovered all his Hit Points, but he is still wounded, bruised, with bandages and other sorts of curatives all around the body. It would be silly if the wounds simply disappeared after 6 hours of sleep, it makes no sense. The wounds are still there, some of the pain is still there, they just aren't mechanically relevant to the game anymore, they don't need to be represented in the rules anymore. The wounds are not affecting the capacity of the character to keep doing his stuff.
A character with full HP is not woundless. HPs are the capacity of the character to keep fighting, not his capacity of being wounded.

Zil said:

It's still essentially the same thing as my earlier example. The power to heal a person is coming from within the person being healed. The divine influence of a cleric's healing spell or touch is now just a catalyst (or inspiration). And as such, it represents a radical departure from past versions of the game; it diminishes the role of a cleric to heal based on channeling the power of his or her god. Whether or not you like this I suppose depends on how attached you are to the idea that a cleric's healing touch/spell really is divine energy passed from a god/pantheon/faith.

Click to expand...

Actually, it depends on how attached you are to the idea that clerics are party medics.

D'karr said:

I'm sure you would.

Click to expand...

What is that supposed to mean? Oh right it's a shot at me because I dared to criticize 4e. Got it.

Zil said:

it diminishes the role of a cleric to heal based on channeling the power of his or her god.

Click to expand...

Actually it just diminishes the need for a cleric to be mostly a healer. I've played clerics and that is a good thing. No more picking spells and having to convert the majority of them to healing spells.

JRRNeiklot said:

What is that supposed to mean? Oh right it's a shot at me because I dared to criticize 4e. Got it.

Click to expand...

Nope, no criticism. You made an assertion and I validated it.

JRRNeiklot said:

So, the ranger is letting his friends die because he's depressed? Yeah, I wanna play that character.

Click to expand...

In what dialect of English does "unconscious" come to mean "depressed?"

What You Quoted said:

When the ranger was on the ground unconscious... next time when he was unconscious on the ground...

Click to expand...

Unless you think emo people just suddenly pass out because of the weight of life's burden on their shoulders, I'm pretty sure there were other factors involved with that ranger's lack of consciousness.

Imban said:

Oh, okay, you just totally misread my first post. While my group isn't entirely a fan of non-magical instant healing (and Healing Signet in Guild Wars is magic, even if Warriors can use it - you'd have been better off just stating the amount they regen while standing back from combat for a few seconds), my post was about how D&D 4e's Healing Surge system was extremely jarring to my group because it makes it so the limit to how much someone can be healed is based on the person in question, rather than on the healer.

For example, in all of those games I cited, and in fact all of the ones you responded with, I can get my face punched in and then use Chakra or First Aid or Healing Signet over and over again until the cows come home.

(And as far as between-battle healing in Tactics Ogre, that's because a long time passed between any two given battles. In fact, the game didn't heal you between battles if you didn't go to the map screen in between them.)

Click to expand...

That's why I'm kind of wondering why somebody consider healing surges a videogame mechanic. As you pointed out, healing being dependant on the HEALED person is something that just doesn't occur in games.

That said, I HAVE read sci-fi/fantasy novels where "magical/sci-fi" healing _IS_ limited to how much the body itself can take at one time. Now, I would figure this would be a GREAT THING in the eyes of people since taking stuff from novels is considered a-ok whereas taking inspiration from videogames is BAD.

(That said, I doubt Mearls et al were influenced by novels since the Healing Surges paradigm is itself pretty damn rare in novels. I suspect the reason why Healing Surges were set by the HEALED character itself was to a) prevent players from simply shooting up in levels every day since you do need to rest and b) most importantly, to still allow for "we're almost out of resources, do we press on?" scenarios.

Hairfoot said:

I haven't read all the posts, so this has probably been said, but I don't see the difference between healing surges and simply giving PCs quadruple hit points (or whatever the accumulated surges add up to).

Click to expand...

Difference between the tactical and strategic scale. You may have HP+(HP*Healing Surges/4) in a given day of adventuring, but you can only go through a given number of those hit points in any given encounter before you can no longer keep going.

It's a median point between 1) complete attrition (barring magic) over the course of a time period and 2) complete restoration between encounters.

JRRNeiklot said:

So, the ranger is letting his friends die because he's depressed?

Click to expand...

Where did get that from??????

Imban said:

Oh, okay, you just totally misread my first post. While my group isn't entirely a fan of non-magical instant healing (and Healing Signet in Guild Wars is magic, even if Warriors can use it - you'd have been better off just stating the amount they regen while standing back from combat for a few seconds), my post was about how D&D 4e's Healing Surge system was extremely jarring to my group because it makes it so the limit to how much someone can be healed is based on the person in question, rather than on the healer.

Click to expand...

D&D healing being based on the healer rather than the healee has been a wart in the system for 30 years. That goes doubly so if you believe damage is physical rather than unspecified mojo points. A 1st level guy might take 5 points damage and have huge wounds and be 1 point away from going down. A 20th level guy might take 50 points and have a cut on his cheek. Despite this, a single CLW spell can bring the 1st level guy back to perfect health, whereas it might take 10 such spells for the 20th level guy.