Hit Points & Healing Surges Finally Explained!

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

How about this definition?
Hit Points - How many hits you can avoid or take before going down.

 

[Jeff Wilder]

When I said in an up-thread post that "I like healing surges," I meant it. If I'd designed them, I'd have done something like this:

(1) All classes have the same number of healing surges. Probably something like five or six. I'd call them something else, but that's not really important here.

(2) Defenders' surges would be largest (in terms of hit points regained), strikers' and leaders' would be next, and controllers' would be smallest.

(3) Hit points would represent almost entirely intangibles ... luck, morale, divine grace, whatever.

(4) Healing surges -- or, more precisely, the lack of them -- would represent some form of lasting injury.

(5) Damage that is very difficult to explain by loss of hit points would, instead, result in loss of healing surges. For example, a fall of forty feet onto hard stone might subtract two healing surges. Standing in a burning building for half a minute might subtract a healing surge, and so on. Poison might deal healing surge damage.

(6) Recovering healing surges would take much longer than six hours. I'm thinking one day per healing surge. Maybe two with care, or three with magical care.

To make it work under current 4E rules, obviously, it would require other changes. For example, monsters would need fewer hit points. My goal would be to shoot for completing an average dungeon -- say, 10 encounters -- before needing to take any serious down time. (Doing so would involve risk, as injuries piled up, but that's what adventurers do, right, is take risks?)

 

[Halivar]

If I was to rename one thing from 4e damage & healing etc, it might be to rename "Healing Surge" as "Adrenaline Surge".

Or maybe just "surge," in order to account for the fact that some hp recovery is of actual, divine healing nature ("Shamwow the cleric buffs out your cuts and bruises. Your skin is good as new!"). Whether it's a healing surge or adrenaline surge depends on the power source that activated the surge.

 

[Lacyon]

When I said in an up-thread post that "I like healing surges," I meant it. If I'd designed them, I'd have done something like this:

Maybe there was some hit mixed in there with all that miss after all?

(1) All classes have the same number of healing surges. Probably something like five or six. I'd call them something else, but that's not really important here.

Given #6, that'd probably be for the best.

(2) Defenders' surges would be largest (in terms of hit points regained), strikers' and leaders' would be next, and controllers' would be smallest.

This is true already, though you might want to tweak the degree. If you drop the defender's surge count to achieve #1, giving him proportionally more hp/level would probably be a good idea. Likewise, if you boost controller surges, dropping his hp would probably be good.

(3) Hit points would represent almost entirely intangibles ... luck, morale, divine grace, whatever.

(4) Healing surges -- or, more precisely, the lack of them -- would represent some form of lasting injury.

Seems fine, although you still probably want there to be a scratches and flesh wounds so that it's possible to use a poisoned blade before chewing through all of a guy's hp.

(5) Damage that is very difficult to explain by loss of hit points would, instead, result in loss of healing surges. For example, a fall of forty feet onto hard stone might subtract two healing surges. Standing in a burning building for half a minute might subtract a healing surge, and so on. Poison might deal healing surge damage.

This is used to a degree in the 4E starvation/thirst/exposure rules, so expanding along these lines is natural.

(6) Recovering healing surges would take much longer than six hours. I'm thinking one day per healing surge. Maybe two with care, or three with magical care.

This is the one that's a big system change from 4E IMO. Healing surges, besides just being a mechanism for non-magical healing, became a way to pull healing magic out of the Vancian model while leaving in the resource-management aspect.

That's not to say you couldn't do it - suppose that Cure Light Wounds (and similar) in 4E, instead of being "target regains hit points as if they spent a healing surge" became "target regains a healing surge and may spend it immediately."

You'd still probably need to increase the number of surges overall, though.

To make it work under current 4E rules, obviously, it would require other changes. For example, monsters would need fewer hit points. My goal would be to shoot for completing an average dungeon -- say, 10 encounters -- before needing to take any serious down time. (Doing so would involve risk, as injuries piled up, but that's what adventurers do, right, is take risks?)

I'm not sure why monsters would need less HP (unless you were going to apply these rules to the monsters as well, which wasn't clear above).

And I suspect that, in play, the incentive would be to press on during a single day (or very few days) until surges were low, then pull back and rest for a week, which would seems like it would break the flow of the game. But maybe not for your style of play.

Anyway, you've given me some food for thought. Thanks!

 

[Celebrim]

You are taking the situation to an extreme and assuming the GM will act like a dick.

As opposed to saying that the DM will say, "The poison dart goes right through your eye socket, take 2 points of damage." Is this less of an extreme or less of an implication that people with the contrary position are jerks?

To be honest, I'm ok with that sort of humor if its offered in good humor. It's ridiculous, it would probably never occur in a real campaign, but it does capture a certain amount of truth. I'm not happy with its apparant use to bash people who disagree, but it is funny.

If you take the idea of 'hit points are abstract representations of luck, skill, and destiny' to similar extremes, it gets similarly ridiculous.

 

[ExploderWizard]

I haven't seen the podcast yet, just saw the comments. I totally get the
abstract nature of hit points. The big issue with this is that the
large pool of abstract something represents everything from hurt feelings
to a punctured lung and the same band aids are expected to fix all these
different issues when there is no fluff, or narration that will help
that concept make any kind of sense.

Trying to flavor the picture of events that have happened with
speculation of what might happen just doesn't work. If a fighter drops below 0 hp from a sword shot and I think that the cleric will use
healing word on his next turn, then I describe the shot as a nasty slash
to the femoral artery that leaves the fighter bleeding on the floor.
What if the cleric doesn't get to use that power?
What if the cleric gets dropped before he gets a turn and the warlord instead says " walk it off son" and the fighter springs back into action?
The rules are followed and the game moves on but the game world had to get clubbed by the silly bat for this to happen.

The system I'm working on now uses hit points and body points.
Hit points are based completely on class/level or HD and have nothing to do with CON or body mass. Hit points are luck, skill, and general
moxie.
HP damage is from things like near misses, glancing blows, and energy
consumed by fending off the attack. No gut spilling wounds happen from pure hp attacks. Hit points are like fatigue and heal quickly.

Body points are based completely on CON and body mass. Class and level
do not matter. Only living things have body points.Non-living things are destroyed at 0 hp. Body points =CON for creatures up to med. size, CON+5 for large, CON+10 for huge, CON+20 for gargantuan, and CON+40 for colossal.

In general, body damage happens when hp run out. Some things such as ingested poison,attacks on a helpless target,ect. do direct body damage.
Body damage represents actual injury and heals rather slowly.
Healing magic works on body damage at a much lower rate than it
does for hit points. A cure light wounds spell might cure 1d8+ of hp damage OR 1 point of body damage at the casters option.

The effect is that real wounds take real time or powerful magic to
heal while hit point damage can be cured easily with rest or magic.
I am currently developing a simple ratio of how many hp can be regained (percentage of maximum)depending on current body point totals and the effects of body damage on combat/skill related performance.

Its still a work in progress.

 

[gizmo33]

"For one thing, he ends that section by stating, "However, having sustained 40 or 50 hit points of damage, our lordly fighter will be covered with a number of nicks, scratches, cuts and bruises. It will require a long period of rest and recuperation to regain the physical and metaphysical peak of 95 hit points." The emphasis is mine, and its intended to show that even though Gygax thought of hit points in partially abstract terms, the basic assumption is that the metaphysical injury to ones luck, destiny, or skill could be expected to heal naturally no faster than we'd expect his physical injuries to heal. The modern philosophy suggests that if you've managed to survive the recent past, then the game should quickly reset so that the experience can be repeated.

Modern?! We're talking the 1970s at the earliest. And does this really make any sense at all? So a fighter with 95 hitpoints lays in bed for 40 or 50 days because he's feeling unlucky? And apparently hitpoints 46-95 actually do represent some part of physical damage, which then strangely takes FAR longer for him to heal than an equivalent injury on a 1st level person. And the game isn't resetting (that's an unwarranted "video game" jab AFAICT - the exaggeration verges on baffling actually).

So what DnD before 4E looks like, without healing magic? (which is really the only reason any of this was ever tolerable IMO) are heroes laying around in bed for months on end in order to heal superficial and/or completely invisible injuries? It's only a "modern philosophy" that finds this comical?

"The only granularity is at the level of healing surges, as any loss of hit points smaller than a single healing surge is more or less identical, and even this requires little real consumption of resources given the emphasis on resetting and refortifying the party. Hording every hit point isn't as important. Preserving resources across a long series of encounters is often unnecessary, and even undesirable.

I find this a combination of objectively false and downright puzzling. And we're way beyond "I don't like coleslaw" here. Let's say my PC has 40 hp. I take 5 damage. I now have 35 hitpoints. If I take 35 damage the next round, I'm dying. Thus it *matters* that I took the 5 damage. Or say that I take 5 damage the following round as well. Now I'm at 30. Now I'm down the amount of a full healing surge. I really find it much like having hitpoints equal to = 4e hitpoints x healing surges. You never recover hp for free, so every point matters.

"Preserving resources" matters in 4E. Short of some houserules or interesting interpretation of Endurance, I can swing a sword with impunity in earlier editions and never drop from exhaustion, so what it really seems to come down to is some feeling on your part that 3E has daily resource management and 4E does not. And that is objectively false. In fact, I would think it would be obvious to both of us that healing surges themselves are a daily resource that need to be managed across multiple encounters. Thus "use of a healing surge" is not a trivial expenditure.

"With 4e, I'm sure the rules are mostly fine, but I've no interest in the feel or the style.

If it were just a matter of the coleslaw analogy, I'd have nothing to say. AFAICT though it's not "feel or style" that you're strictly limiting yourself to when you are talking about things like granularity, which is far more objective of an issue than how you feel.

"I don't like the 4E PHB because it weighs 8000 lbs and I don't like heavy things". The fact that the speaker doesn't like heavy things is a matter of opinion that I don't dispute - but the "facts" they use to support this I find capable of a more objective analysis.

 

[Celebrim]

Good and valuable stuff snipped so I could say that there are cases where hit points can represent shear brute toughness. If you run a game in the style of, say, Naruto, then a high level fighter is quite literally more resilient than a stone wall (and his bones might well make good construction material...).

Sure, you could play that way and be perfectly justified in doing so. It wouldn't necessarily be my preference, but it would work and it would be consistant and fairly straight forward to narrate.

As much as 'hit points are abstract' is claimed about 4e, it isn't really consistantly applied. Goblins throw harpoons and pull the target with ropes. They don't just abstractly skewer the target. We assign lots of hit points to big monsters not because they are dodgy, lucky, or fated but because we assume that there large bodies will be able to absorb lots of physical punishment. Characters with large amounts of hit points are imagined as big, hardy, robust individuals. Races with a tendency to have alot of hit points are protrayed as stout, stocky, and blockish, rather than thin, nimble, willowy and waifish. Things that make you tough tend to be related to physical qualities.

So I don't think its true to say that hit points are purely abstract in 4e. And yet, whether the wound is abstract or tangible, all healing regardless of the source effects the wound the same.

The basic problem with trying to claim that hit points are abstract in 4e or not abstract in 4e is that 4e doesn't care. The question of 'What do hit points represent' isn't really even part of the design of 4e in my opinion. They don't represent or model anything. Representing and modeling things is not a very 4e approach. Hit points in 4e are just hit points. They don't represent or model anything else. Characters have hit points, not wounds or luck or destiny or anything else. Thinking to hard about what hit points represent is being far too simulationist for 4e IMO. That's why I've always said that I think 4e would be harder for me to run than earlier editions no matter how much simplified or streamlined the rules might be.

 

[chaotix42]

IThe way I see it, in 4E, it's all bruises and buffets until you become Bloodied. After that, you're taking more serious punishment, but still nothing really major until you go negative. At that point you've taken a dangerous, potentially mortal wound; without magical healing or a surge of heroic willpower, you're liable to bleed out and die.

This is pretty much how I run it. Before bloodied you get mostly knocked around, take nicks & cuts & other flesh wounds. When you're bloodied by a hit, then we get a laceration or some other nasty wound.

 

[Jeff Wilder]

Anything I'm not quoting is a demurrer.

Maybe there was some hit mixed in there with all that miss after all?

If you throw the dart hard enough, it doesn't matter if you're throwing it 180 degrees off-target!

Given #6, that'd probably be for the best.

Yes, number 6 is why.

Seems fine, although you still probably want there to be a scratches and flesh wounds so that it's possible to use a poisoned blade before chewing through all of a guy's hp.

That's why "almost" entirely, though as I think about it, is it really necessary? If poison does "surge damage," it could just have its own attack roll, right? Anyway, just thinking out loud.

This is used to a degree in the 4E starvation/thirst/exposure rules, so expanding along these lines is natural.

Cool. I've suggested something similar in the House Rules forum for 3E, because I feel the designers really missed an opportunity to use Constitution damage to represent stuff like falls and drowning.

I'm not sure why monsters would need less HP (unless you were going to apply these rules to the monsters as well, which wasn't clear above).

Monsters would need fewer HP in 4E (as it exists now) because combat goes on for rounds after it's effectively settled, and those rounds mean damage. If hit points and surges for PCs don't significantly increase, those resources will be spent more quickly than they should be to reach the "10 encounter" goal I was talking about.

Increasing hit points and surges is another way to balance things, but if 4E combats do grind (and in my limited experience, they do), I figure might at well fix that at the same time.

But again, bear in mind that this is the hypothetical situation of trying to retrofit currently existing 4E. Building from the ground up, it wouldn't need to be so much "eyeballing."

And I suspect that, in play, the incentive would be to press on during a single day (or very few days) until surges were low, then pull back and rest for a week, which would seems like it would break the flow of the game. But maybe not for your style of play.

I guess not. More than 10 encounters without significant healing -- and I mean "healing of injuries" (represented by surges), not "recovery of hit points" -- strains my sense of verisimilitude.

How many encounters is a level in 4E? Should a PC need any significant recovery time during those encounters? My feeling is "yes." Yours may well be "no," in which case we're probably back to why extant 4E healing works for you (I presume), but not for me.