The reasoning, as restated by Hussar, is that in the real world humans don't recover from near-fatal wounds inflicted by bladed weapons with a few days to a few weeks of bedrest.
Again, you're assuming the real world, rather than the modern fantasy genre, which is why I tried to be very clear on the distinction.
Hence, whatever injuries are in 3E (and to a slightly lesser extent, given its longer recovery times, in AD&D) they are not near-fatal wounds inflicted by bladed weapons.
This isn't matching up with what I'm asking for, which is the ability of the mechanics to handle a narrative of a serious wound that heals faster than in real life, as that follows the modern fantasy genre closely. Not all wounds need to be this way, obviously, but I'd like it to be an option.
Sure. Which is what I said, ie, that wounds in 3E must be pretty much like wounds in 4e ie minor bruises, cuts, etc that are not "terrible, nasty wounds".
Not when they knock you unconscious for 8-9 days at level 1 (or the assumed majority of the population in 3.X). You're not unconscious for 8 days on a sprain or minor bruise. The mechanics are clearly simulating a serious wound as of that point, but within the realm of the modern fantasy genre, not reality.
At which point, the difference between a few hours, a few days and a few weeks strikes me as one of taste (and preference in adventure pacing), not one of realism.
In both my response to you and Hussar, I've talked about the fantasy genre, and I keep getting the conversation directed to realism. I'm not sure why. Obviously it has to do with taste, but my objection in this discussion is the closing of the narrative (that is, every PC recovers quickly), rather than a mechanic that allows for multiple narratives (sometimes your wounds are light and recover quickly, and sometimes they're bad and take a while).
Well, 3E substantially narrows narrative options too - namely, it is impossible in 3E to narrate a fantasy game in which, flesh wounds being only flesh wounds, heroes can proceed without being hampered by them after a night's rest.
In 3.X, you can get injured in such a way that you heal overnight -the damage was light. If you're level 8 and you take 8 hit points, the damage was light, and it was bruising and so on; it's gone in the morning. Alternatively, you could go from 80 to -8, where it was much worse, where you were bleeding out, and where it took you 11 days to recover.
3.X supports both narratives, it just lets the dice decide how much damage you take.
3.X doesn't shut these narratives out. At least, I don't see a narrative based on the healing over night mechanic in 4e that is not available in 3.X.
And in any event, serious injury or debilitating injury is not completely shut out - it is only excluded by application of the combat mechanics. So, for example, nothing in the mechanics stops a GM having an NPC perform a coup-de-grace on a helpless or unconscious PC and narrating a death result (that is, a result which takes the game out of the combat mechanics, at least until upper Paragon and Epic tiers) as something else - a mortal wound, a limb severed, or whatever. That might be a little bit beyond the rookie GM level, although perhaps not all that much beyond it, and in any event I think there was a Dragon magazine article that discussed this. (The trickier element of this is actually deciding what ritual is required to deal with such an injury. In my own game, it's Remove Affliction. I can imagine others wanting to use Raise Dead instead.)
This raises another problem for me, but it's immersion-related.
Anyway, and as I said upthread, I can understand why some prefer gritty to cinematic. But cinematic doesn't narrow the options of gritty-lovers any more than vice versa. And I can't see that either is open to accusations of being possible to narrate coherently or without absurdity. There is certainly nothing in 4e that differs from 3E such that it would require assuming that every PC has Wolverine-style regeneration (which some in this thread have asserted).
If I'm not one of the people that have asserted it, I really don't feel like it has much to do with my take on this discussion.
In a system that supports wounds that naturally take some time to heal based on severity (how much HP damage you took), it allows for a narrative where the PCs escaped with light injuries (low damage taken), or with serious injuries (high damage taken). In a system that does not support wounds that naturally take some time to heal based on severity, it forces the narrative to be comprised of light injuries, or fatalities (with little room in between unless it's through GM fiat).
One such system was published in White Dwarf 30 or so years ago now - Roger Musson's "How to Lose Hit Points and Survive". I think that WotC's Wounds and Vitality system is nearly identical to Musson's system.
Another version, just as old, is Runequest's, which uses hit points to measure both damage to particular body locations, and to measure overall injury and hence fatigue/exhaustion/bleeding/concussion.
Another similar system is Rolemaster's, which uses hit points (called "concussion hits") to measure fatigue, some bruising, and bleeding, but uses wounds as superimposed conditions to reflect serious injury. Concussion hits heal easily (either naturally or via magic), while wounds are generally hard to heal (and unless healed magically tend to leave permanent debilitation).
In my RPG, I divided HP into two pools to separate physical from "other" but I don't have a hit location or a fatigue/exhaustion/bleeding/concussion track. I do, however, have a Hit Chart that can potentially lead to serious injury, as well as called shots to go for those shots. This opens up a massive array of narrative paths available when we watch the story unfold each session. I'd like to see that many narrative options available in a system, even if it's option -in this case, the dials Mr. Mearls was speaking of. You don't have to have a Hit Chart in the base rules, or long injuries. Those can be more complex dials. However, I don't want a system that prevents stories from being told, and 3.X and 4e were both too limiting for me.
As to tweaking dials - having read this thread, it seems that more people object to the rate of surge recovery in 4e, than object to the intricate dynamics of healing that are part of the game's combat mechanics.
I think people object to the narrative issues caused (though not for the same reasons I do). It looked like most people objected to the difficulty in separating HP from physical wounds, and the limbo characters can find themselves in ("it turns out it wasn't as bad") that was a departure from the way older editions handled description (which was turn-by-turn).
If I was WotC wanting to incorporate dials, this one is trivially easy - just stick in a sidebar explaining that you can make the game grittier by slowing down surge recovery to one per exteneded rest, or one per week of extended rest. You could also include an optional role for the Healing skill. Nothing else about the game mechanics would have to change in light of such a sidebar (although adventure design might have to).
I'd have the dial affect more than that, for sure. Healing surges also cause other problems in my mind (healing is mostly an internal resource rather than an external resource), but that's taste, too. I dislike that about them. They have multiple issues, but I don't think people minded the idea of a "second wind" for a heroic burst of vitality. People might be okay with a "feel free to slow the healing surge rate down" if healing surges didn't contradict description for more groups, but as it stands, I feel that's the main objection in this thread.
