Hit Points & Healing Surges Finally Explained!

[Jeff Wilder]

As much as 'hit points are abstract' is claimed about 4e, it isn't really consistantly applied.

Not even at WotC. During the video of the game session against the mind flayer, the DM (I've forgotten who it was) consistently described damage in terms of physical injury.

 

[Celebrim]

Modern?! We're talking the 1970s at the earliest.

Fourth edition was around in 1970?

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?

No character in 1st edition ever takes 40 or 50 days to naturally heal. Whether that's a problem is a whole different discussion, but it would lie on the side of 'D&D treats wounds too abstractly'. As for lying in bed because you feel unlucky, that's not as ridiculous as it is sounds at first, but I don't even have to defend it because its such an obviously false claim. If you've read page 82, then you'd realize that Gygax never assumes all of a high level characters hit points are intangible - some he admits represents the ability to absorb damage. So a high level character is slowly healing up all those aforementioned nicks, gashes, bruises, cuts and bumps. While he's doing that he's also restoring his confidence, his flexibility, his stamina, the favor of the gods or whatever else you think his hit points represent.

And apparently hitpoints 46-95 actually do represent some part of physical damage...

Well duh.

...which then strangely takes FAR longer for him to heal than an equivalent injury on a 1st level person.

Please stop pontificating over rules you don't know or understand. Besides which, I'm not sure what points you hope to score by proving that 1st edition D&D is unrealistic.

And the game isn't resetting (that's an unwarranted "video game" jab AFAICT - the exaggeration verges on baffling actually).

Which english verb would you prefer I use to capture the same meaning as 'reset'? As for it being a jab, I would be perfectly happy describing leaving the dungeon, returning to town and resting for a week as being a 'reset' in 1st edition. Yet you aren't claiming that I'm saying that 1st edition is too 'video gamey' - an analogy I already dismissed earlier in the thread anyway.

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?

First of all, you are again completely clueless about the 1st edition rules. No one that has actually read page 82 of the first edition DMG would write the above. Secondly, I think it can be fairly assumed that a character spending a couple weeks resting would have signfiicant physical injuries.

As for the rest, why should I bother explaining how I'd narrate and justify the above to someone that so clearly has a chip on his shoulder that he's willing to pontificate on the effects of rules even without knowing what those rules are? Or to condemn explanations without even knowing the full explanations?

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.

Oh good grief. You are willfully misunderstanding me now.

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.

Sure. But did I ever say anything about daily resource management? I believe you are the one that introduced that idea. I was speaking about resource management between 'resets', which was the idea of the point at which players could assume they'd be able to replenish the vast majority of their resources. I wasn't really speaking about 'daily resource management at all' nor making any claims about 1st editions 'daily resource management'. For one thing, in 1st edition you usually can't reset - even at high levels - in as small of a time period as a day. You can probably recover all your hit points in a day if you have enough healiing spells, but then you'll need to wait another day to recover your spells. But I never claimed 4e doesn't have reset management, I merely said that the feel of the resource management was very different than earlier editions and 1st edition in particular.

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.

Well, if you honestly think that its obvious to both of us that this is true, why are you assuming that my opinion doesn't take it into account?

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.

So are you seriously advancing the argument that nothing has really changed with regards to tempo or granularity in 4e compared to 1e? How can you possibly claim this and at the same time mock 1st edition for a guy resting for months (not even true, but nevermind) to recover his hit points? Does that ever happen in 4e?

Sheesh.

 

[roguerouge]

If you get healed by the cleric, then your wound closes up thanks to the power of the gods. If you get inspired by the warlord, then you struggle back to your feet and keep on fighting through sheer grit and determination: "Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die."

Do you describe below 0 HP is unconscious and dying or conscious and dying? The latter has two advantages: you get to do last words if you die and you avoid the weirdness of inspiring words helping someone who's unconscious.

 

[Celebrim]

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?)

Something like that might work.

I think I'd add:

(7) Characters with few (1?, 2?, 3?) or no healing surges are subject to increasingly harsh 'wounded' conditions.

Or maybe...

(8) Each round spent below zero hit points causes the loss of a healing surge.

And I'd personally edge toward making healing surges difficult to recover. Most magical healing would represent things of the 'close wounds' variaty - stablizing the character rather than truly healing them. Maybe 'Heal' or similarly powerful (ritual?) magic might actually grant a healing surge, or perhaps a very difficult heal check (surgery, also a ritual?)

 

[Lacyon]

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.

Poison in 4E does have it's own attack roll (vs. Fort) - it's generally a followup attack after a normal hit with the poisoned blade, but can be rolled by itself for poison gasses.

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.

Heh. It is used for drowning (after 3 minutes without air, increasing-DC endurance checks for each additional minute, failure = lose a surge that you can't recover until you're able to breathe again).

As for falling, if you're in an encounter, you lose HP and become more likely to fall to attacks. Outside of an encounter, you spend the surges to restore your HP before you get to your next battle. So you're down surges (unless someone used magic that didn't require a surge, but hey, that's magic).

EDIT: Whoops. That was a misread on my part.

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.

Fair enough.

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."

You could do the calculations if you don't like the eyeballing . The math on how much damage at-level critters do per round, while not perfectly consistent, is at least on average consistent.

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.

(A level in 4E is ~10 encounters)

It's more that I'm willing to get the recovery time by means other than enforced long-duration healing times. (Just like, with your system, you could get multi-day adventuring by spreading the encounters out).

In one of the old threads, Mustrum_Ridcully (I think) suggested a system whereby everything works pretty similarly to what 4E does now, except that an extended rest costs a "recovery point" or something in addition to the normal requirements. The PCs have a set number of these "recovery points" that they can use in an adventure, and in order to recover them, they have to take a longer-term rest (say, a week).

 

[chaotix42]

avoid the weirdness of inspiring words helping someone who's unconscious.

I like the idea of the warlord's words being so jarring they wake his unconscious allies. Ever been awoken by a loud noise?

Wait, does an ally even have to hear an Inspiring Word to benefit from it? *checks PHB* Nope, you can be deafened and still benefit. So you'd have to lip-read? Wait, you could blinded too. Inspiring Tap On The Shoulder then?

 

[roguerouge]

I like the idea of the warlord's words being so jarring they wake his unconscious allies. Ever been awoken by a loud noise?

Wait, does an ally even have to hear an Inspiring Word to benefit from it? *checks PHB* Nope, you can be deafened and still benefit. So you'd have to lip-read? Wait, you could blinded too. Inspiring Tap On The Shoulder then?

Now I'm thinking of doctors leaning over coma patients and yelling at them to "Get up!" or a long line of nurses shaking and slapping patients until they feel better, like in Airplane with that hysterical woman.

As for the Inspiring Tap on the Shoulder, I think the warlord would do what's done in sports, where it's generally a hearty slap on the top of the head or on the ass. A terrorist fist bump would also work...

More seriously, asleep does not equal unconscious due to physical trauma, not in game or RL terms. So, I'm still in the "that's silly" response line.

 

[chaotix42]

Yeah it could be silly, but I would also argue cinematic for the warlord's words to be so rousing as to wake his allies from violence-induced comas. Makes me think of the grizzled vet who is pulling his knocked-out friend across a shellshocked battlefield, yelling at him to snap out of it.

It can very well get to silly levels though, which I think I've illustrated. I'm in the "that's cool!" response line, until a certain point. ('~' ) ( '~')

 

[Mallus]

Now I'm thinking of doctors leaning over coma patients and yelling at them to "Get up!" or a long line of nurses shaking and slapping patients until they feel better, like in Airplane with that hysterical woman.

As for the Inspiring Tap on the Shoulder, I think the warlord would do what's done in sports, where it's generally a hearty slap on the top of the head or on the ass. A terrorist fist bump would also work...

I think both of those are great and match the general level of gravitas I've experienced in D&D campaigns.

 

[Scribble]

AHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

Goddammit you bitch! You never backed away from anything in your life! Now Fight! Fight! Fight! Right now! Fight goddammit! Fight! Fight! Fiiiiiiight!!!!!!!!!