I don't get the dislike of healing surges

[prosfilaes]

And, I used my example, not because I believe that D&D is somehow realistic, but because one of the big arguments I've come across (not from you, of course) is that HS are not realistic. But realism is a terrible argument with D&D, since it's not designed to be realistic. HP are not realistic. Gaining levels and somehow, immediately knowing new things is not realistic. HS are not realistic. AC is not realistic. Magic Missle is not realistic. All realism arguments in D&D are immediately thrown out, in my book.

Really? So if your DM has a human continue attacking you after you've cut off his head, you'll accept that and not think that it might be something other than a simple human?

Realism is a hard line to walk in action/fantasy, but that doesn't mean it's not necessary. Indiana Jones and John McClane do a lot of stuff that would get people killed in real life, but nobody ever empties a gun point-blank into their face, and the audience would mutiny if that happened and our heros just shrugged it off. When Hans Gruber got dropped off a building, the audience didn't have to see the body to know he was dead. What needs to be realistic varies based on genre and person, but without a basis of realism, we don't know whether or not our hero is scared of being dangled 100 ft in the air over a lake of acid with acid-breathing sharks in it.

I don't know why you say that AC is unrealistic; if you distill armor down to one value, AC is realistic as far as I know. Magic missile is perfectly realistic, once you accept the fantastic basis for it.

 

[The Shaman]

I remember the days when D&D seemed to lag behind the cutting edge of RPG design . . .

Newer != better.

Saving Throws vs. Petrification and Polymorph? "THAC0"? Really?!

Yes, really.

In many ways 3E was a saving grace; not only did it revive D&D as a community and game, but it vastly improved the rules system itself.

Newer != better.

And "I don't like it" != "bad."

. . . (I)t never seemed to make sense that an Ancient Red Dragon had less HP than a 10th level fighter.

Never heard of Saint George?


As far as healing surges go, they are a solution for someone else's problem, not mine.

 

[billd91]

If you don't mind my asking, why do you believe this? I'm not saying you're wrong, or whatever, I'm just very curious why you feel this way. I may have missed something in my evaluation of the system. You can see my previous post to see my thoughts on it.

On a narrative level, they take a dramatic event (the second wind) and turn it common place. I can take them in every fight, more than once with a little help. That feels too often to be dramatically bouncing back from trouble (unless that's your particular idiom as in the SWSE character investing in multiple chances to catch his second wind).

On a mechanical level, the shift of healing from external resource to internal causes problems. I like being able to pass my healing potion to another character who has had a few unlucky breaks in the course of a fight. If he's out of surges, I can't do that because the healing runs off his own internal resource. You can't concentrate the healing like you could in previous editions. In the game we're playing, the wizard almost never taps his surges while the rogue, paladin, and ranger are doing so all the time. The wizard's healing resource is wasted because it's not used nor can it be transferred while the others are over-taxed and hard to supplement. The only thing about healing someone and surges that I like is the way a paladin's laying on of hands uses his own surge to help someone else. That's a nice touch. The paladin sacrifices his own durability to help someone else... of course it's kind of spoiled by giving him more surges in the first place to compensate for it, undercutting the magnitude of the sacrifice.

I also think that, as far as campaign and resource management goes, they serve to bring back pressure toward a short adventuring day in an area 3x had largely fixed away from that tendency. Healing was cheap in 3x in the form of cure light wounds wands, level-based additions to healing spells, and spontaneous healing. Parties could go a long time compared to 1e and 2e with their more limited healing.

If I were to revise healing in 4e, I'd utterly divorce magical healing from using the healing surges of the target creature. That's a minimum. If I were to beyond just healing, I'd ditch most daily powers (certainly all the martials), ditch the current use of action points, and come up with some kind of dramatic narrative pool for characters that could be used to gain an extra action, push an encounter power up to an extraordinary level of success (replacing daily powers), push use of a skill to an extraordinary level, make a save, or gain a second wind in a fight.

 

[avin]

Hello OP! I've played and DMed 4E for more than a year.

And I hate Healing Surges.

I also hate Thac0 (sorry The Shaman, been there, done that, even the name thac0 is horrible).

I guess there's always something people will dislike in any edition of D&D.

 

[Spatula]

"Healing Surge" covers a lot of different topics, but people seem to be jumbling them all together, making it hard to tell what it is that they object to exactly.

I mean, what is a surge? This is how I see it:

1) The amount of healing received is relative to the max HP of the heal-ee, not the power of the healer (at least, not 100% the power of the healer). This to me is what a healing surge "is", and it's an elegant solution to some of the HP-related oddities from earlier editions. It also eliminates the need for multiple, separate healing spells that differ only in their potency.

2) A resource that limits how many times a character can be healed in a day. This limit is necessitated by the existence of unlimited (encounter) healing spells in 4e, but might not be needed in a system when spell-casting was more constrained.

I also see people bringing up general 4e healing rules, which aren't really tied to surges.

1) Second wind / self-healing / non-magical healing / healing to full HP after a battle. Healing to full after a fight has been the norm in D&D for as long as I can remember, so I am guessing that it's being able to do it without magic that bothers people.

2) The lack of any damage that last longer than a day (diseases & starvation excepted).

As for why people object to them, I agree with what Bedrockgames stated upthread. HP have always meant to be abstract, but most (if not all) gamers don't think of them as such in practice. Being "hit" by a sword means that a sharp deadly weapon has connected with your body. That higher-level characters can survive many such sword hits while lower-level characters cannot is just how it is. That you don't suffer any "real" injuries until you're at or below 0 HP is just how it is. It's easy to hand-wave it all away and not really think about it. But on some level, 4e forces players to confront the abstractness inherent in the rules, and a lot of people don't like that.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

Healing surges are the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of character health once a character takes damage. The narrative can only be presented in hindsight once the outcome has been determined.

The PC doesn't blow healing surge? His wounds are life-threatening and he is seriously courting death every round. That last blow drew a mortal wound...

The PC blows a surge? 'Tis only a flesh wound! There was never any REAL damage! The last blow barely scraped the hero...

Except its always been like this. In 1st/2nd edition, your first level mage with 3 hit points stubs his toe and his leg almost falls off or is scratched by a house cat for 2 hit points of damage. Oh no! He's almost dead. He's gushing blood, barely clinging to life because the bad kitty got him. The high level fighter is barely concerned. Then you go to rest, and since you heal 1 hp a day, the low level mage is suddenly able to fully recuperate from dramatic trauma in 2 days, while it takes the fighter 2 days to fully recover from a small scratch? Similarly, that 6 HP life threatening sword stab is easily repaired by Cure Light Wounds.... since when are life threatening sword stabs light wounds?

Unless we treat all HP as the same. In which case the low level person really is dying from a single swat from a cat and the high level person has multiple spears poking out of his heart and functions without penalty (hey, he's still got 10hp left.).

HP, healing, damage.... its all abstract. Its ALWAYS been abstract. If you have a problem with healing surges, and you didnt have a problem with HP/damage/healing before, you either werent thinking about it, or are just a hypocrite. Or more likely, you're just looking for something to harp on regarding 4th edition, and the Grognard Gripe Table result pointed to surges rather than "video gamey/WOW". Granted, often the Grognard Grouse Miscability Table provides an overlap, as has previously been displayed in the thread, and surges are both unrealistic AND video-gamey.

A game with them reminds me of the movie the Last Action Hero -- if the hero is alive, it's only a flesh wound.

And here we have all of D&D, from OD&D to now. If you arent dead, it wasnt that bad. You're pretty mucht 8 hours of the cleric taking a nap and a cast of St Cuthbert's Fortifying Zerberts to be functioning.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

You're pretty mucht 8 hours of the cleric taking a nap and a cast of St Cuthbert's Fortifying Zerberts to be functioning.

A lot more can happen, narratively, in 8 hours of campaign time than in the few minutes between encounters in a 4Ed game when a PC simply burns enough HSs to improve his health.

And if that cleric isn't around...

 

[Oryan77]

I've never heard people defend the HP system as not being a representation of physical damage as much as I have until 4e came out.

I know I might get a lot of slack for saying this, but to me, this seems like nothing more than an excuse to defend the healing surge system and to explain how the system is not unbelievable/videogamey. Or it's an excuse to justify how wonky the HP system actually is if you try to think of it as just physical damage. It's like an easy cop-out.

If I have to think of the HP system as "physical endurance, skill, luck, and resolve", then I have to assume a percentage of the "damage" from a claw attack is physical damage if I can die by reaching -10 HP. Why not tell me what that percentage of physical damage is? Give me a way to track it since I can die from it, and we'll just assume that "skill, luck, and resolve" were factored into the attack I received from a beasts claws and ignore those the way we ignore physical damage with the idea of Healing Surges.

I don't need a system to "heal" the skill, luck, and resolve damage unless I want my Fighter to "heal" himself & not be dependent on a Healer. But I could use a system to heal the wounds I took since that is what kills me.

I don't know, I get what people say when they explain their view of the HP system. But I've honestly never had any difficulty using the HP system as a representation of physical damage (unless I wanted the ability for my Fighter to heal himself). And to me, that would make it videogamey.

 

[The Shaman]

I also hate Thac0 (sorry The Shaman, been there, done that, even the name thac0 is horrible).

No need to apologize to me or anyone else for what you don't like in a roleplaying game.

I guess there's always something people will dislike in any edition of D&D.

And I appreciate you expressing it that way, as a reflection of your person preference.

Unfortunately there are some gamers who can't or won't differentiate between, "I don't like x," and, "x is teh suxxors!"

 

[prosfilaes]

HP, healing, damage.... its all abstract.

Everything's abstract; even the greatest supercomputer couldn't track damage to the human body without abstracting something. That doesn't mean we should just accept any results uncritically. If abstract was fine, why not go back to OD&D and all weapons doing 1d6 damage?

If you have a problem with healing surges, and you didnt have a problem with HP/damage/healing before, you either werent thinking about it,

I did have a problem. But healing surges made it worse.

Or more likely, you're just looking for something to harp on regarding 4th edition

If it were all equal, then nobody should have been happy about WotC making 4E. If you can legitimately like 4e better than older editions, there's obviously enough difference that we can legitimately like it less.