Forked Thread: Healing Surges: Let's see them in Action!

[Obryn]

good stuff

Yep, that's pretty much the argument. Well put, and good examples.

-O

 

[Mallus]

What do you mean by no convalescence? A mechanical reason for a player to choose to have his PC sit in bed for an extended period of in-game time?

If so, then no, 4E doesn't do this.

What amuses me about this is neither does 3e. It was in 3e that made healing magics so inexpensive as to be a trivial resource expenditure for all but the lowest level parties. Therefore, no need for extended convalescence.

Sure, you could make cheap healing rare in your 3e campaign, but that's a conscious decision to ignore an obvious default assumption. An item that's cheap isn't meant to be rare (even 3e's economics aren't that wonky).

 

[Kraydak]

I am going to ramble on for a bit. I think that there are very good reasons some people have for not liking 4E, but I don't think it's because you can't narrate things a certain way.

I think it's because 4E takes Immersion to the shed and shoots it in the face.

Total agreement about 4E and immersion. Immersion and narration are (perhaps unfortunately) very closely linked, which covers most of your point 1. I have more points related to it in (3).

2:

PHB, pg 185:

Stabilize the Dying: Make a DC 15 Heal check to stabilize an adjacent dying character. if you succeed, the character can stop making death saving throws until he or she takes damage. The character's current hit point total doesn't change as a result of being stabilized.​

This situation happens when the PC is either out of Healing Surges and/or can't access a Healing Surge, and has to make Death Saves. Not very common, but it can still occur.

You partly missed my point. In 4e, you are either alive and kicking or dead. Incapacitation will last for rounds, at most. This kills a whole lot of "narration space", and also (in the absence of magical healing) makes life a whole lot more complicated immersion-wise.

3:
DM: "You get slashed by the sword. 18 damage."
Fighter: "Oh, I'm down."
DM: "Ah, it's a bad wound, a deep slash across your chest from your shoulder to your hip. Your collarbone breaks and your blood flows freely, seeping from underneath your armour, and you collapse."
Warlord: "I yell at him: Get the hell up, you sissy! This is no time to be taking a nap!"
Fighter: "Um... the wound closes up?"
DM: "No, no. The wound's still there. He just inspired you to get up and fight on. And guess what - you're tough enough to do it."
Fighter: "What a bad-ass I am."
Warlord: "You're even more bad-ass than that. First, I use Knight's Move to get you back on your feet."
Fighter: "Sweet, I get up."
Warlord: "'Good, good!' I say. 'Now let's show him what we're made of!' Hammer and Anvil. If I hit, you get to make a free basic attack. And - yep, it's a hit! Add +3, my Cha bonus, to your damage."
Fighter: "I flex my hand on my sword and raise it above my head - yes, even though my collarbone is broken, I raise it high and grit through the pain - and smash it down on him in grim revenge, driven mad by the inspiring presence of the Two-Face Warlord here!"

4E PCs are bad-asses.

My point is that you don't have to worry that much. You might have to accept the (action movie) trope that people can grit their teeth and dish out the pain even when the chips are down. If you don't like that, then you'd probably have to be careful with your narration.

Note that the fighter will be *at full, with full healing surges* after an extended rest, even though his gaping chest wound is still there. He isn't being a bad-ass for fighting with a gaping chest wound, instead he is being a pansy for caring about gaping chest wounds in the first place, since they don't actually threaten his continued existence. Under such narration, characters quite literally don't actually need functioning aortas (or any other body-part).

And that is a problem, if you want to narrate wounds, because you are going to take immersion out behind the shed and shoot it in the face. This is a distinct step backwards from previous editions, where you *could* narrate wounds (and thereby enhance immersion) relatively easily. If you don't have immersion, you might as well be playing a board game (or a CRPG). Immersion is the trump card that pen and paper games hold.

This is also why (going back to the original point of the thread), when the distinction can be made at all literature/TV show/movies references etc... almost invariably do not follow the healing-surge mechanic. Immersion and narration are, after all, crucial in those arenas.

 

[Kraydak]

What amuses me about this is neither does 3e. It was in 3e that made healing magics so inexpensive as to be a trivial resource expenditure for all but the lowest level parties. Therefore, no need for extended convalescence.

Sure, you could make cheap healing rare in your 3e campaign, but that's a conscious decision to ignore an obvious default assumption. An item that's cheap isn't meant to be rare (even 3e's economics aren't that wonky).

I bolded a key word for you. Please try to understand that that word is actually important to a lot of us. Please understand that we aren't asking for convalescence for the sake of sitting around doing nothing, but rather because otherwise we wonder where the wounds went (with a Warlord, say), and whether our characters actually need their livers intact for long-term survival.

 

[Mallus]

Please understand that we aren't asking for convalescence for the sake of sitting around doing nothing, but rather because otherwise we wonder where the wounds went...

You could say that wounds go to the same place momentum goes to in D&D or, taking a different tack, the wounds weren't as bad as they first seemed (say for characters healed by a Warlord).

edit: I do know that different people construct/arrive at believability different ways. Ultimately, that process is at least partially, if not wholly, arbitrary. For instance I have no problem with science fiction that features small, SUV-sized faster-than-light spaceships --which don't double as time machines-- which are about as realistic as a person breathing hard vacuum. However, a person breathing vacuum would be a total deal-killer.

What gets me about arguments over 4e's healing system is that it's not particularly difficult to narrate it in genre-appropriate terms, which folks have done throughout this thread. It takes a lot more mental effort to make it not work.

 

[ExploderWizard]

1:

What do you mean by no convalescence? A mechanical reason for a player to choose to have his PC sit in bed for an extended period of in-game time?

If so, then no, 4E doesn't do this.

That really has nothing to do with narration, though. I can narrate my guy being in bed with bad wounds. Mechanically, he's at full kick-ass power.

I can say, "After that last foray into the dungeon, my PC is tending to his wounds. His shoulder is separated and a few of his ribs are broken from the ogre's smash."

Then when the goblins bring the fight to the PCs, he picks up his sword and gets right in there. "He fights through the pain and dishes out some of it."

What a bad-ass.

There's nothing wrong with wanting a game to reward players who make the choice to have their PC recuperate for an extended period of in-game time. This is different from having required narration. What it does is to force a different set of choices; ie. I'm wounded, so I rest; the game makes this a choice that I want to make.

4E doesn't ask players to make that choice. It says, "You're wounded (the colour) but you can still fight; you don't have to stay in bed; if you keep going then you can keep getting treasure and XP."

I think that when you say "You can't narrate convalescence" you're wrong; obviously you can. "My guy is hurt and he stays in bed." What you don't have is any game mechanic rewarding you for making that choice (and, in effect, it "penalizes" that choice because while you're in bed you're not getting any XP). So there's no reason for the player to play the character as though he were wounded. Immersion is damaged.

I understand your POV here. It comes more from what the mechanics of the system encourage and support than anything else.

As far as 4E characters and badassery are concerned, its a general shift in power scale that changes the feel of the game.

Convalescence. A dirty word in 4E. I don't remember prior edition rules that bothered with specific injuries and recovery times that were required to be able to function if you were damaged? In both cases, 4E as well as prior editions, you could be fully active and functional as long as you had 1 hit point.

In 1E if you were a fighter with 40 hp, with no access to magical healing and took 15 damage in a combat you had options. You could continue on if time was of the essence, or you could rest and recover. Just because you had been damaged didn't mean you HAD to lie in bed until you were back to full HP, it was your choice. The decision to press on with only 25 HP because the child from the village was still held captive somewhere in the lair was meaningful. It was a true hero and badass that went into danger wounded because it had to be done.

The 4E model of healing supports the kind of player that we used to call goldbrickers. These are the types that had to have the best stats, AC, and number of HP and whined if they had to do anything at less than full capacity, the kind of player that lived for the 15 minute adventuring day.If the mechanics make you so badass that nothing that doesn't kill you will really even slow you down how heroic do you really need to be?

It really is a style thing. I like adventurers as people that get hurt, but do what needs doing anyway rather than unstoppable machines.

 

[Obryn]

You partly missed my point. In 4e, you are either alive and kicking or dead. Incapacitation will last for rounds, at most. This kills a whole lot of "narration space", and also (in the absence of magical healing) makes life a whole lot more complicated immersion-wise.

I think that's a little spurious.

You have plenty of narration space in 4e combat. Said narration will not have a 1:1 correspondence with actual mechanical impairment, but in my mind this is nothing new. Injuries haven't had effects other than HP loss in the history of the game. It's only recovery from the injuries - in time and methods - that have changed.

There's nothing inherent in magical-or-long-term-healing that is more realistic than a quick recovery system.

I'm not saying it's insane to prefer one way or the other. I'm saying that is a decision that can only be made from preferred playstyles, not arguments to realism. If you think it crucial that the rules support long recovery times, then obviously 4e's healing system won't work for your game without heavy modification.

Note that the fighter will be *at full, with full healing surges* after an extended rest, even though his gaping chest wound is still there. He isn't being a bad-ass for fighting with a gaping chest wound, instead he is being a pansy for caring about gaping chest wounds in the first place, since they don't actually threaten his continued existence. Under such narration, characters quite literally don't actually need functioning aortas (or any other body-part).

Again, I think you're making HPs out to be something they don't have to be. More on this in a sec.

And that is a problem, if you want to narrate wounds, because you are going to take immersion out behind the shed and shoot it in the face. This is a distinct step backwards from previous editions, where you *could* narrate wounds (and thereby enhance immersion) relatively easily. If you don't have immersion, you might as well be playing a board game (or a CRPG). Immersion is the trump card that pen and paper games hold.

Quite simply - how?

In what ways did - let's say - 1e support sprained ankles, severed arms, and cracked ribs better than 4e does? IMHO, it doesn't. HPs are too flimsy a mechanic to hold everything you want to hang on them.

If you want to model long-term injuries, you need a system to support long-term injuries. Arguably, 3e's ability score damage can handle a lot of this heavy lifting. Arguably, 4e's disease track mechanisms can do similar. Regardless, it's not an out-of-the-box assumption of the game that a certain number of HPs mean anything other than ... well that number of HPs.


I think the crucial problem here is that it's senseless to argue about what HP's are. I think it's a lot more useful to debate what HP's do.

-O

 

[Mallus]

In 1E if you were a fighter with 40 hp, with no access to magical healing and took 15 damage in a combat you had options. You could continue on if time was of the essence, or you could rest and recover. Just because you had been damaged didn't mean you HAD to lie in bed until you were back to full HP, it was your choice.

How often did that happen in practice? My experience of 1e is that you rested until your cleric or druid recovered their spells.

The 4E model of healing supports the kind of player that we used to call goldbrickers. These are the types that had to have the best stats, AC, and number of HP and whined if they had to do anything at less than full capacity, the kind of player that lived for the 15 minute adventuring day.

4e characters have most of their hit points stored up in their Healing Surges, which in my experience they blow through rather quickly. So characters are expending resources, which do matter, and funnily enough, which are restored after a night's sleep, just like in the previous editions.

I like adventurers as people that get hurt, but do what needs doing anyway rather than unstoppable machines.

Losing/using Healing Surges = getting hurt.

 

[Hussar]

The 4E model of healing supports the kind of player that we used to call goldbrickers. These are the types that had to have the best stats, AC, and number of HP and whined if they had to do anything at less than full capacity, the kind of player that lived for the 15 minute adventuring day.If the mechanics make you so badass that nothing that doesn't kill you will really even slow you down how heroic do you really need to be?

Ehh? Why? You don't have unlimited healing surges. That's the point that keeps getting ignored. You take better than a 1/4 of your hit points in damage. You burn a healing surge. You are now down a healing surge. You can't stop because there is a time dependency in your example, so you push on. You get nickeled down again and burn a healing surge, maybe 2. You push on. You get tapped a again, this time you take a 5 minute break and blow 3 healing surges. Now you're down 6 healing surges. You have maybe 2 or 3 left. That next fight, you certainly aren't full. And if there's two more fights ahead, you have a serious problem.

The idea that you're going to be maxed out each and every encounter simply isn't true. Unless we go back to the 3e paradigm of 1 encounter/day (since we're taking cheap edition shots), running out of healing surges is a serious threat.

Kraydak, I'd respond to your three points, but, LostSoul basically said it better than I could.

 

[LostSoul]

Total agreement about 4E and immersion. Immersion and narration are (perhaps unfortunately) very closely linked, which covers most of your point 1. I have more points related to it in (3).

To get immersion you need to have narration that sounds "right", but you don't need to have immersion to have narration that sounds right.

Immersion is a goal some people have, but it doesn't define role-playing games. I don't put any great importance on it, for instance. I think you can still play a role without feeling that you are the character within the fictional world.