Schroedinger's Wounding (Forked Thread: Disappointed in 4e)

[Raven Crowking]

Actually, it is just as in 3E. If you increase natural healing, Wizards get healed to full health faster then Fighters. Is that what you'd want? For verisimilitude? For balance? For gampeplay? "Hey, Fighters, get off your lazy ass, Mr.Wizard is already fit to blast his enemies".

If the party was waiting until everyone was at full, what difference would it make if X recovered at Y-1, and Z recovered at Y? If you wanted to, you could just as easily say "All remaining damage to all characters is healed after the passage of X days/hours/minutes." Whatever it is you want. Fast healing is laughably easy to set up in D&D 0 to 3.5. Hecek, in 3.0 and 3.5, you can even use the "Fast Healing" quality, adding it to all PCs or all creatures....whatever it is you want.

Speaking of Wizards - what if I'd see spell levels recovering over night as stupid or bad for my game? How would you change the spell recovery rates?

In the case of wizards, spells recover after 8 hours of rest, plus study time, so you have specific numbers you can play with quite easily. For "24-hour" types, like clerics, you just need to use the wizard paradigm and say "4 hours rest," "two hours rest", etc.

This is really, really simple to do in D&D versions 0 to 3.5. I am rather surprised that you would think otherwise?



RC

 

[Scribble]

If the party was waiting until everyone was at full, what difference would it make if X recovered at Y-1, and Z recovered at Y? If you wanted to, you could just as easily say "All remaining damage to all characters is healed after the passage of X days/hours/minutes." Whatever it is you want. Fast healing is laughably easy to set up in D&D 0 to 3.5. Hecek, in 3.0 and 3.5, you can even use the "Fast Healing" quality, adding it to all PCs or all creatures....whatever it is you want.

If time is of the essance, sometimes you can't wait for everyone to be at 100% and have to make due with some people at like 80-90%

Plus like mustrum says... why should it take the guy who's in peak physical condition longer then the weakling mage to heal up?

I agree the better way to do it would be to tie it to the endurance skill.

 

[GlaziusF]

The first is a bruising of the brain, the second a lack of oxygen to the brain, both of which are/or cause damage and thus what I consider to be injuries. YMMV.

Well, yes, and the muscle tears and strained ligaments that come with parrying off an ogre's club rather than letting it crush your fragile human ribcage (but still losing 24 hit points) are also "injuries".

But continuing the potentially inappropriate quantum physics analogies, these are Heisenbergian injuries - to verify that they exist you need to inflict worse damage. They are "below the resolution limit of the observer", if you will.

Our group does not go with this interpretation... I play a warlord in our group's 4E campaign and we ruled as a group that Inspiring Word does not work if the target is unconscious.

Well, yes. If you're going to decide that parts of the rules don't apply, the parts of the model that follow from those rules don't apply either.

This is, in fact, my entire problem with the idea that the wounding paradox is integral to 4E - the people who complain that the rules mandate it have already decided that the rules don't mean what they say they do.

 

[Jeff Wilder]

FWIW as a data point, none of my groups makes regular use of wands of cure light wounds. We certainly don't craft them or go out of our way to buy them. Nor do we go out of our way to buy potions of healing. (We have gone out of our way to buy a wand of lesser restoration, though.)

As I think about why this may be, the thing that jumps at me is the statement made upthread that the cost for a wand of cure light wounds or potions is trivial ... we really don't consider it to be so. Don't get me wrong, we're quite capable of doing the math; we know that a wand of cure light wounds is the cheapest healing in the game ... except for PCs with healing powers, which is what we rely on.

(In the interest of full disclosure, though: one game (14th level) has a heal-bot radiant servant of Pelor as a cohort, one game (12th level) has two characters with strong healing ability, and one game (12th level) has a spontaneous healer with Augment Healing, and an artificer with a bajillion defensive items that heavily mitigate damage as it's taken.)

 

[pemerton]

However, there is a further and more dominant factor here that while not explicit in the rules, is implicit within the context of general gameplay. In the majority of cases in 3E, magical healing is both accessible and often used. This is to the point where I cannot specifically remember a time in a 3.x game I have played where if a character was forced into the negatives, someone did not come along with a magical potion, spell or wand to "save" the character. Because of this, a DM could describe some truly horrible injuries, safe in the knowledge that magical healing was on the way and that the plausability factor of the event would not be undermined (if anything, the horrid injury description would hasten the other PCs to assist).

In 4E though, magical healing is nowhere near as pervasive as it was in 3E. Natural healing is the most common form of healing in 4E. As such, moderation is required in description less the plausibility of the description be undermined. Describe what you want but if it is more than what a PC can recover from whilst returning to unhindered performance in a short space of time, then there will be a disconnect between your description and what is reasonable. As such, in 4E you can never validly describe a character as badly wounded, unless they then die from the injuries (but not until they die).

All told, there is a significant difference between the editions.

I think this is a good point.

I don't see how it is relevant that theoretically the Fighter might never get healed in 24 (or 6) hours if on his own, when practically he is never on his own and will be healed by the party's Cleric or other magical healing in short time. What's stopping the sandbox player from using a Wand of Cure Light Wounds or the parties Cleric to get him his hit points back?

<snip>

So, similarly, yeah, theoretically healing should take days or weeks, but people would just use a Cleric or magical items to heal themselves to full hp over a short time period. So, away with that nonsense of slow natural healing. Handwave it, explain it with wounds still visible but overcome by moral or pain resistance, or performing some healing ritual, it doesn't matter, the end effect is the same - the party is up and running the next day, whether you have full hit point recovery as RAW or not.

Or you could fudge it by adding a new, gameplay-neutral ability to clerics (gameplay neutral under the assumption that every party contains a cleric, which seems to have been the norm in earlier editions):

If the complaints are really about extended rests, just add the following class feature to Clerics: also automatically learn the 1st level ritual Heal All Wounds, cost free, no skill check required, 10 minutes to perform, after an extended rest the target recovers all healing surges. Now the game plays no differently except every party needs a cleric (or some other ritualist who has payed to learn this ritual).

We have now recreated the verisimilitude of 3E healing.

The designers could have easily fooled you. Using the disease track to make recovering healing surges difficult should be very easy, for example. And then just add a 1st level Ritual that allows people to recover all healing surges if cast before an extended rest. I could now go and defend their system against sandboxers that love mundane healing and discover that just one spell can ruin their fun: "Just don't use the ritual, and you'd be fine, just as you didn't use Clerics or Wands of CLW or Potions in some AD&D and D&D 3E campaigns!"

Exactly.

 

[Fifth Element]

Plus like mustrum says... why should it take the guy who's in peak physical condition longer then the weakling mage to heal up?

This sounds like a cut & paste question from many of my posts earlier in this thread. To which I imagine we'll get a C&P answer about C&Ping previous answers.

Hit points are awesome!

 

[Raven Crowking]

This sounds like a cut & paste question from many of my posts earlier in this thread. To which I imagine we'll get a C&P answer about C&Ping previous answers.

Nah. What would be the point?

Me, I'm just shocked that this thread is still clinging to life. I mean, how many hit points does it have?!?!

Hit points are awesome!

Sorry, I have to spread some XP around before I can give them to you again.



May I say that this is a refreshing.....[9th Doctor]and fantastic[/9th Doctor]......way of making the boards seem just that little bit better? Kudos.


RC

 

[Fifth Element]

Me, I'm just shocked that this thread is still clinging to life. I mean, how many hit points does it have?!?!

This is probably the first thing in this thread that I agree with you 100% on.

(Oh, and you should also ask how many healing surges it has. Otherwise you don't know how wounding it really is. Healing surges are awesome.)

May I say that this is a refreshing.....[9th Doctor]and fantastic[/9th Doctor]......way of making the boards seem just that little bit better? Kudos.

Thanks. Hopefully sometimes it can get people thinking about what they like about the game rather than what they don't like.

 

[Herremann the Wise]

Our group does not go with this interpretation... I play a warlord in our group's 4E campaign and we ruled as a group that Inspiring Word does not work if the target is unconscious.

...This is, in fact, my entire problem with the idea that the wounding paradox is integral to 4E - the people who complain that the rules mandate it have already decided that the rules don't mean what they say they do.

How is something that out group has house-ruled pertinent to the discussion here? It is because an unconscious person shouldn't be able to hear a warlord's shouting that we introduced the house rule. Generally if people complain about a "problem", wouldn't you then expect them to do something about it to fix the problem? I believe the discussion and points made in regards to schroedinger's wounding obviously still stand regardless of what our group has house-ruled above and beyond that.

But on that, is it some type of commonsense that I (and my group) are not seeing whereby an unconscious combatant can be stirred to both consciousness and health by having the martial (that is non-magical) warlord "calling out inspiring words of courage and determination"? To us this does not make sense. GlaziusF, I'm sure you could come up with another colourful, imaginative and wonderful explanation for this, that would have me trying to give you experience points again, or alternatively, you may point to the rules that try to muddle around what the "official" definition of unconsciousness is, but to us, a warlord calling out to an ally is just not going to cut the mustard when they're unconscious.

Best Regards
Herremann the Wise

 

[pemerton]

Herreman, one narration I've heard suggested (can't remember by whom) for healing of an unconscious ally by the warlord is this: that as the ally lies on the ground, having given up the fight, they suddenly remember the warlord, and their duty to him/her and their other allies, and rouse themselves into action. (For a cinematic instance of this, think of Aragorn's recovery from the fall over the cliff in the Two Towers movie.)

Of course, this way of doing it opens up even more the gap between gameworld and mechanics - as the use by the warlord's player of the healing power does not correspond to something that the warlord PC is actually doing in the gameworld at that time - and so may not be attractive to you.