D&D 4E 4E, Healing, and Suspension of Disbelief

[silentounce]

I mean this in the nicest possible of ways, but I think a better question is have you ever been seriously injured, yourself? I am rather accident prone, and have broken a few bones and busted myself up on a few occasions - when I snapped my ankle I was not only able to walk it off but also drive myself and some friends home.

Sheer adrenaline can do a lot - perhaps you can represent a Healing Surge to yourself not as the removal of physical injury, but the capacity to ignore that injury for a time until later on when you take an extended rest and realize how badly hurt you really were. So your fighter might be able to ignore the wound in his side for now, but when he goes to lie down he discovers the gaping wound in his side and needs to wrap it with herb-soaked poultices to keep it from getting infected and to heal it.

Ok, fine, that explains healing surges. Now, when you woke up the next day after you broke your ankle, was it completely healed?

watch the troy fight scene with achilles and hector. An awesome fight where guys sure look like they are loosing HP (well hector) without getting any physical damage....until the end.
Spear into hector...reduce to less than 0HP
followed up by Coup de grace with the short sword.

Damnit! Why'd you have to ruin it for me? I've been looking forward to that movie for the past 3000 years.

 

[Wormwood]

<nevermind>

 

[Brecht]

And if 1 HP is supposed to be very near to physical death

Actually, 1 HP is "very near" to being knocked unconscious ..

 

[Aria Silverhands]

It's easier to just rename Hit Points to Endurance and then rename Healing Surges to Recovery. If you want to simulate wounds, create a separate Wounds attribute to keep track of. Wounds are best taken through crits with superficial attacks reducing endurance. I have a house rules thread with the above system already written out.

 

[MarkB]

One thing that's worth keeping in mind is that, in 4e, a character who is at full hit points but has used up half his healing surges is not really at full health - he's actually pretty badly beaten up.

He's managed to bind his wounds, push through the pain barrier, etc. so that he can face up to the next challenge, but he won't be truly back to full health until he gets all his healing surges back.

 

[Agamon]

But this has never been the case. Agreed, 4E takes the distinction to a mechanical level heretofore unseen--but it's a matter of degree, not direction. In no edition of D&D have hit points equaled sheer physical health. The fact that you interpreted them as such is not the fault of, nor a flaw in, the current edition.

The Mouse has it right. It's always been this way. This is just the first time the mechanics have actually made it very explicit. Hell, my last stab at 2e, I had a house rule wher eonly the last 10% of you hp was physical, the rest weren't. It's silly to think a human could have the same physical threshhold of a gargantuan dragon, even for a fantasy game.

 

[Obryn]

I've always believed, since the days of the Red Box Rules, that hit points were representative of the amount of damage someone (or something) could sustain before being destroyed. HP = Life Points = Health, whatever. 4E changed that, and now, HP are representative of an all-encompassing, physical/psychological condition that may or may not indicate actual damage, depending on the means by which it can be remedied.

Uncle Gary disagreed, quite clearly and specifically, in the AD&D DMG. He in fact called the notion that a high-level fighter could take a lot more sword hits ridiculous. Page 82, I think, if your AD&D DMG is nearby.

D&D has never had - built into its rules set - a system to represent actual injury. Hit points are and can only be very abstract. There's no such thing as a pool of internal "stuff" that gets reduced without affecting your abilities in any way, but when you suddenly pass zero, you're out.

You can house-rule up a system, should you wish. The VP/WP rules presented in SW and Unearthed Arcana do the trick pretty well for 3e.

Otherwise, you're looking at something like Runequest.

A Second Wind makes sense if hit points make sense.

-O

 

[baberg]

Ok, fine, that explains healing surges. Now, when you woke up the next day after you broke your ankle, was it completely healed?

D&D 4th Edition doesn't model broken bones, so your analogy is flawed. The only major injuries modeled in 4e (that I can think of) are diseases which gets a roll after each extended rest.

And this topic really has been done to death. 4e is not 3.X is not 2nd is not BECMI. In 4e HP "measure your ability to stand up to punishment, turn deadly strikes into glancing blows, and stay on your feet throughout a battle. Hit points represent more than physical endurance. They represent your character’s skill, luck, and resolve - all the factors that combine to help you stay alive in a combat situation."

Everything else is moot.

 

[LostSoul]

IMO, that's not a good thing. It forces me to change the way a critical element of the D&D game works in my head, in a way that I do not care for, for no real reason except to clumsily explain why everyone can now spontaneously heal themselves.

Unless I'm misreading you, the real reason is that it's supposed to support a certain play experience.

Why don't you want to change the way the D&D game works in your head? No judgement here - either way is cool. I'm just wondering why.

 

[Regicide]

You can't seperate HPs from injury. A person at 1 HP will fall over and die without assistance if they're hit by a stone thrown by a small child. Are they really tired? No, they're injured, and near death. They spend 6 seconds and go to their happy place and suddenly they're at 25% HP and no longer going to die from said child. Whats happened? It can't be explained. Healing surges are not internally consistent. 4E is a bunch of inconsistent garbage thrown together.

3E got passed this in a simple way. Magic. You rest for a day you get some small amount of HPs back. You want fast healing, you have to use magic. Thats fine. Thats consistent. 4E you could use up all your healing surges and then try and resort to magic in the form of a healing potion and... it doesn't work. Why, magical healing only works when you aren't actually injured? No explainable reason. It's internally inconsistent.

It's easy to suspend disbelief for fantasy mechanics, but when those mechanics are internally inconsistent it's impossible. You lose immersion and have to just accept the fact that you're playing a game and not part of one.