I don't get the dislike of healing surges

[Crazy Jerome]

What's a Van Halen? Is that the new Monte Cook creation that lets a bard spend a healing surge to heal the entire party to full hitpoints? That rocks!

Naw, it's a new monster. It's a cross between the siren and the banshee, but with better pitch and hair.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Naw, it's a new monster. It's a cross between the siren and the banshee, but with better pitch and hair.

1) it's an old monster

2) you forgot it's high-kick & kalaidoscopic spandex powers

 

[Asmo]

Note that many adventurers have found that slayed Van Halens acutally wears fake hair.

Asmo

 

[BryonD]

*points to his previous quote* I believe I just did.

/snip for my own blinding stupidity.

Ahh, no. My mistake was trying in the first place. You have a good day now.

Yep, you ninja'ed me and I missed it.

That is my fault. I apologize.

 

[tuxgeo]

The thing I dislike about helium surges is that, when your character drops to 0 hit points and uses a helium surge, the character's body inflates and floats away into the sky, and you can't get it back down.
(Kind of like Frisbeetarianism.)


Oh, wait -- you said "healing surges," not "helium surges." Never mind.

 

[jodyjohnson]

I had issues with the rationalisation of HPs prior to 4e and felt like there should be a rules solution.

When 4e launched 3+ years ago, I was glad for a resolution to the 'speed of healing'/'divine only' issues we also had. However we recognized the narrative problems with HS. But in the end, we adapted and continue to play blissfully (with regard to HS at least).

This thread has clarified that what really bothered me about HP previously was apparent only with blow-by-blow narrative. Since that aspect was something we had problems with anyway, it was easy for us to jettison and accept the narrative problems with HS by not trying to do blow-by-blow narration.

It also makes sense that the DMs that employed/enjoyed blow-by-blow narration didn't like 4e and have since switched to SW or PF.

This is also reminds me that TSR didn't IMO fragment the market but that the intensely personal/group nature of RPGs itself leads to fragmentation. In some respect that fragmentation within even a small group of designer/players/non-players at TSR led to a fragmented product schedule to serve a continually fragmenting market.


With that in mind, I recall Mike Mearls reference to the 'Spaghetti sauce marketing guy' and the idea of not creating 'the perfect sauce', but of putting together a product stable of sauces. Maybe WotC can't release 'the 31 flavors of D&D' but I think they are trying to do something similar with the modular system he keeps pimping.

 

[Alzrius]

Hit point loss represents taking physical damage. Conversely, regaining hit points represents physical healing.

The above point is fundamental to understanding why I don't like healing surges - they necessitate that the above understanding be discarded and replaced with an alternative understanding for what hit points represent (e.g. that hit points are a character's "ability to keep fighting" or something similar).

This may have already been talked about, but I haven't read the thread to the end, since I wanted to reply to Jameson. But, unfortunately, Hit Point loss, has never fully represented taking physical damage. Not with OD&D, 1e, 2e, 3.x, PF, 4e, not with any of them. Hit points have always been a very abstract concept that includes a bunch of factors, including, but certainly not limited to, physical health, mental health, endurance, vitality, ability to mitigate damage, glancing blows, luck, etc. Gary Gygax himself spoke about this, as far as I know, as early as the 1e DMG.

A few things I wanted to clear up.

First, the emboldened part of my previous post that you quoted wasn't me making any sort of statement about the game itself - it was my saying where I'm coming from on the issue of hit point loss and healing. For me, they always have been, and always will be, physical damage. What's in the books isn't really important on that score (though I personally think that the books agree with me, see below).

There are serious problems with thinking of HP as ONLY physical damage, more so than what you already spoke of. First and foremost, in my mind, if you take a sword hit that does 50% of your physical damage, how are you now able to continue fighting at 100%? I like to think of Boromir in LotR, when he takes the arrow in the chest. He's still conscious, he still has some motor activity, but he certainly cannot fight at 100%. He tries to fight of course, but as he keeps taking arrows, he becomes weaker and weaker.

See, I don't see that as having any impact on the question of whether or not hit point loss is due to physical damage whatsoever. The very nature of D&D combat is abstract, and so a lot of factors are simply not dealt with, such as hit locations, wound tracking, facing, combat fatigue, etc.

Saying that "hit point loss cannot be physical damage since it doesn't impact your fighting ability" is, to my thinking, a failure to follow the game's own brand of logic - combat damage has no secondary effects, because it can only model so much. Now, there are some special effects for various things like feats, spells, etc. But these are explicitly called out as having a special effect.

Here's a quote from the 1e DMG, written by Mr. Gygax himself. (It's the only one I could find in a short amount of time, without access to my books, and at work, but it should suffice).

It is quite unreasonable to assume that as a character gains levels of ability in his or her class that a corresponding gain in actual ability to sustain
physical damage takes place. It is preposterous to state such an
assumption, for if we are to assume that a man is killed by a sword thrust
which does 4 hit points of damage, we must similarly assume that a hero
could, on the average, withstand five such thrusts before being slain! Why
then the increase in hit points? Because these reflect both the actual
physical ability of the character to withstand damage - as indicated by
constitution bonuses- and a commensurate increase in such areas as skill
in combat and similar life-or-death situations, the "sixth sense" whith
warns the individual of some otherwise unforeseen events, sheer luck,
and the fantastic provisions of magical protections and/or divine
protection. Therefore, constitution affects both actual ability to withstand physical punishment hit points (physique) and the immeasurable areas which involve the sixth sense and luck (fitness).

Bolded area is key to understanding that HP do not completely reflect actual, physical damage.

We're taking very different things away from that particular passage.

What I got from that is that Gary is giving us narrative devices to explain why physical damage that's taken is comparatively less severe at higher levels, even when the amount of damage remains the same. In other words, he's not denying that the character is still taking physical punishment, he's just taking less of it due to things like luck, a sixth sense, divine protection, etc. allowing him to take, as Gary put it, "five such thrusts."

Those thrusts are still hitting, in other words, just not as palpably, due to purely narrative explanations. But they're all still physically damaging blows taken in combat.

Of course, it's ultimately something of a moot point anyway. Not only because that's the 1E interpretation (as opposed to 3.X, which was much more explicit in saying that hit point loss was physical damage), but also because quoting somebody else's ideas aren't going to make me say "Oh, I've been doing it wrong."

The OP asked why we don't like healing surges, and my previous post was me saying why I don't. Hit point loss in my games is physical damage, and regaining hit points is wound closure. Having characters non-magically experience a burst of healing as a voluntary action on their part is, quite simply, too out there for me to accept.

 

[pemerton]

Gary is giving us narrative devices to explain why physical damage that's taken is comparatively less severe at higher levels, even when the amount of damage remains the same. In other words, he's not denying that the character is still taking physical punishment, he's just taking less of it due to things like luck, a sixth sense, divine protection, etc.

This seems to me to imply that 4 hit points, which might be fatal for a 0-level or 1st level PC (and hence anything but a light wound), would be the merest scratch when delivered to a high level fighter.

Which means that something is badly wrong with healing magic in AD&D (and also, I think, healing rates, although I have seen it argued that a high level fighter takes much longer to recover to peak than a 0-level PC). Would you agree?

 

[Hussar]

I wonder if people who have such difficulty with the narration of healing surges had similar issues with a one minute round? Or, did people just sort of hand wave that away and ignore the fact that there were all sorts of things that were supposed to be happening in that round, but not movement (because disengaging from an enemy, or turning a flank had its own rules) and simply concentrate on the short period of time that the die roll actually represented?

 

[BryonD]

I wonder if people who have such difficulty with the narration of healing surges had similar issues with a one minute round?

I was never a fan of the one minute round, but I don't really see a relationship between that and surges.

To me they just always seemed like an odd hold-over from the war game roots. Using one minute rounds for a mass battle that may last a long time is reasonable. But that doesn't provide a good representation of what happens in a skirmish. And, of course, it is important to keep in mind that in my case, I preferred other games to AD&D anyway.

But it really isn't an equivalent issue because it didn't come into play. First, you could easily completely ignore it. You could run a combat that lasted 8 rounds and not care if it was 45 seconds or 8 minutes. 99+% of the time it had no bearing on anything. Healing surges can't be ignored that way.

Second, it doesn't create a nonsense in the narrative. It may not be the best option to describe your narrative in which everyone is feinting and dodging for a ridiculous amount of time between finding quality openings for the "attack", but there is no "nonsense" in it. No one ever needed to defend that by saying "hey, the game is some abstract anyway, adding a little more here doesn't hurt anything".

I also find it interesting that you choose to use the phrase "have such difficulty with the narration of healing surges". It seems to show a strong difference in understanding of the issue.

I can narrate healing surges as well as anyone else in this thread can. And you could come sit at my table for us for the single purpose of narrating our healing surges if that made you feel better. But it wouldn't solve the problem because you would still be creating the nonsense abstractions that so many other 4E advocates have already said are just something which should be ignored.

I have no problem with narration. I have a problem with adding nonsense into my story. I have a superior story telling tool and I use that. Using a hammer to drive nails does not mean I have a problem with screw drivers.

You have also equated surges to an old rule that was found to be inferior and was discarded. And, just speaking personally, that may be one thing I have NEVER heard anyone actually complain about.