I don't get the dislike of healing surges

[JamesonCourage]

As I said in the post to which you replied, and have posted earlier upthread, there is no rule in 4e that says that wounds heal overnight. Nor is there any rule that implies it.

Thus my puzzlement - you seem to be concerned by an imputed feature of 4e that the game in fact lacks.

I don't know. I feel like I've been really clear about this, but I'm apparently missing the mark on this one. If so many people are missing what I've been trying to communicate over the past week, I can only assume it's my fault.

I'm saying that wounds always heal overnight mechanically (that is, as hit points). This mechanically affects the story in a very direct, very real way. The decisions made based on this fact cuts off narrative paths (story paths) where it could otherwise be different (if wounds [hit points] don't heal naturally overnight, people might retreat, get reinforcements, proceed but fail, etc.). Does that help clear what I mean up?

I haven't seen this part of the other thread, but here's my maths for a PC dropped to -1 hp, and therefore losing 1 hp per round with a 10% chance to stabilise per round: the chance to recover is 0.1, +09*0.1, +0.9*0.9*0.1, and so on up to 0.9^8*0.1, = 0.1* (0.9 + 0.9^2 ... + 0.9^8) = 0.1 * 5.12579511, which is a little over one-half, and hence yields a chance of death a little under one half. Obviously this chance will grow as the initial wound becomes more serious - the chance to die if dropped to -9 hp is 90%!

I personally think that, if one is assuming that natural healing will be coming into play, this is a bit of an obstacle to narrating the chest-sucker - certainly with a 50% chance of natural recovery, this couldn't be narrated for a -1 wound, but even for a -9 wound one might wonder what sort of chest-sucker spontaneously stabilises within 6 seconds 90% of the time.

In the other Narrative "Challenge" thread, I wrote this (and Herremann wrote something similar):

According to Herremann, if you're at -5 and you've got five shots at stabilizing before death, then you've got a 41% chance of stabilizing. Okay, that's a sizable chunk. So, we'll be generous and say that you stabilize every three rolls (fail, fail, succeed). You've stabilized at -7. Yay, right?

According to RAW, this is what it looks like without help:

Recovering without Help
A severely wounded character left alone usually dies. He has a small chance, however, of recovering on his own.

A character who becomes stable on his own (by making the 10% roll while dying) and who has no one to tend to him still loses hit points, just at a slower rate. He has a 10% chance each hour of becoming conscious. Each time he misses his hourly roll to become conscious, he loses 1 hit point. He also does not recover hit points through natural healing.

Even once he becomes conscious and is disabled, an unaided character still does not recover hit points naturally. Instead, each day he has a 10% chance to start recovering hit points naturally (starting with that day); otherwise, he loses 1 hit point.

Once an unaided character starts recovering hit points naturally, he is no longer in danger of naturally losing hit points (even if his current hit point total is negative).

So, you roll each hour, with a 10% chance each hour of becoming conscious. I said every two rolls, so you wake up at -9. However, you're still at -9, and you still don't recover wounds naturally, you've still got to roll 10% chances. Which means, yes, you lose another hit point and die at -10.

So, yeah, it's supported by 3.X mechanics. Without help, that character will almost certainly die.

My main problem with that is that this change is no greater in scope than the dearth of magical healing, both via class and item, that is so crucial to getting the wounding narrative in 3e.

Thus my quip to Mort that we are not allowed to tweak 4e to taste.

Your proposition is to change mechanics (HP damage follows the disease track), whereas wound description and magical healing don't necessarily change mechanics (and probably don't, in fact). Thus, I would consider the former a house rule, but the latter flavor.

I missed this earlier, somehow(I blame the pagebreak). I think I can answer this one for you. The disconnect I have here is that you are equating the loss of HP with wounds, but these wounds have no mechanical or story impact, by RAW, other than making the next blow more likely to be (narrated as) fatal. This means that any meaningful narrative and/or consequences of these wounds begins and ends in your hands already. So, why is it then that you are unwilling to hold onto that narrative when the HP is restored? The hp damage only ever served as a rough guideline by which you narrated the getting of wounds. It never handled any consequence of the wound. You were doing that yourself already. So, why not just still do that?

Again, I feel like I've somehow colossally failed to communicate my point. I can only blame myself for that, as several very intelligent posters seem to be missing it.

I communicate HP as "wounds" because they inevitably are. That is, the only way one physically can die in 4e is, I believe, through HP damage. That means that at some point, they become wounds.

Now, that doesn't mean they're always wounds. And I'm not trying to say they are. I'm trying to express "wounds" in the sense of "mechanical loss of HP."

My point is when you mechanically lose HP, and you regain it back each night, you lose narratives where that wouldn't otherwise be the case, because the party has to make a very real and significant decision on what to do about it (press on, get reinforcements, retreat until healed, hide, give up, etc.).

Does that make sense? I'm not speaking of the description of wounds. I've tried to express that before, but I've apparently failed at that. I'm speaking of mechanical wounds. Saying, "wounds aren't there mechanically unless you make them be there by describing them" is missing the point, as I'm speaking of HP loss. I'm speaking of HP loss, and how always having rapid recovery of it (overnight) cuts out potential narrative paths (story branches) that might be there if wounds have a chance of lasting longer.

I think this should help clarify my view. I hope so, at least. As always, play what you like

 

[Pentius]

Again, I feel like I've somehow colossally failed to communicate my point. I can only blame myself for that, as several very intelligent posters seem to be missing it.

I communicate HP as "wounds" because they inevitably are. That is, the only way one physically can die in 4e is, I believe, through HP damage. That means that at some point, they become wounds.

Now, that doesn't mean they're always wounds. And I'm not trying to say they are. I'm trying to express "wounds" in the sense of "mechanical loss of HP."

My point is when you mechanically lose HP, and you regain it back each night, you lose narratives where that wouldn't otherwise be the case, because the party has to make a very real and significant decision on what to do about it (press on, get reinforcements, retreat until healed, hide, give up, etc.).

Does that make sense? I'm not speaking of narrative wounds. I've tried to express that before, but I've apparently failed at that. I'm speaking of mechanical wounds. Saying, "wounds are there mechanically unless you make them be" is missing the point, as I'm speaking of HP loss. I'm speaking of HP loss, and how always having rapid recovery of it (overnight) cuts out potential narrative paths (story branches) that might be there if wounds have a chance of lasting longer.

I think this should help clarify my view. I hope so, at least. As always, play what you like

I feel like I'm almost getting it, but still missing it. Narratively, I'm not even sure how a difference in non-wound HP would be expressed. The party simply lacks plot protection. That narrates the same, differing only in the narration of how the party survives or doesn't survive another brush with death.

Now, meta-game, HP are a resource, and a party will be more cautious if they are low on such, but ime, surges and HP fit the same role. A party low on surges faces the same decision, and the same narrative paths. Do they rest and face the challenge at full resources later or press on face the challenge with less resources now?

In your experience the difference between days and one day may be pretty big, but given that there is no tenable reason for wounds to be the case, only verve, it seems very much arbitrary to me how long one waits.

 

[JamesonCourage]

Now, meta-game, HP are a resource, and a party will be more cautious if they are low on such, but ime, surges and HP fit the same role. A party low on surges faces the same decision, and the same narrative paths. Do they rest and face the challenge at full resources later or press on face the challenge with less resources now?

In your experience the difference between days and one day may be pretty big, but given that there is no tenable reason for wounds to be the case, only verve, it seems very much arbitrary to me how long one waits.

In my experience, the difference between one day and several days can be literally insignificant, but it can also be massive.

Right now my party is tucked away in their castle. However, they've recently discovered that there's an assassin hiding somewhere inside the castle, and so they feel their safety is very much in jeopardy (the assassin has already taken a shot with a crossbow, hitting one of them). There's no healer in the party, but they do have a surgeon working for them (to help them heal naturally). Right now, the party has plans to make a move to take the nearby city, and have coordinated their allies to strike another castle and a second city on the same day. If the assassin injured two of them (say, the general PC and the negotiator PC) when they were attempting to leave to the city, the entire plan would be in jeopardy. Do they continue the two day trek to the city while injured? Do they go, and risk dying? Do they send someone in their place who is less capable, or certainly less trustworthy (either another general, another negotiator, or both)? Do they follow, but not engage directly?

All of these things are possibilities based on slow mechanical HP recovery, and as such, they are narrative paths lost from 4e. One day gives you some narrative paths. Three days gives you more. One month gives you more. Then again, in about 8 sessions, it's been a little over 26 months in-game already. So, time passes relatively quickly in my campaign. This makes HP damage heal quicker (even with a slow rate), but also makes HP damage more meaningful when time is important. I like this dynamic.

Does this help? As always, play what you like

 

[Pentius]

All of these things are possibilities based on slow mechanical HP recovery, and as such, they are narrative paths lost from 4e. One day gives you some narrative paths. Three days gives you more. One month gives you more. Then again, in about 8 sessions, it's been a little over 26 months in-game already. So, time passes relatively quickly in my campaign. This makes HP damage heal quicker (even with a slow rate), but also makes HP damage more meaningful when time is important. I like this dynamic.

Does this help? As always, play what you like

It kind of helps. All of these are based on a lot of meta-game knowledge that I recognize does impact play a lot. Still, just as low recovery time opens the new path of reacting slowly, it cuts off the old path of reacting quickly. The mechanics can't suggest both as the best course of action. That suggests to me that it is a wash. Maybe the precise path of restoring HP slower is preferable to you, and that's fine, but that undercuts the prevailing argument that we who switch to 4e have lost a huge swath of narrative ground. Rather, it suggests we've made a trade-off of one path for another, which is much harder to assign a value judgement to.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Like earlier editions of D&D (and putting AD&D's death's door rules to one side), 4e has no rule about how long wounds take to heal...

(emphasis mine)

Not entirely accurate.

SRD

Natural Healing
With a full night’s rest (8 hours of sleep or more), you recover 1 hit point per character level. Any significant interruption during your rest prevents you from healing that night.

If you undergo complete bed rest for an entire day and night, you recover twice your character level in hit points.

(There's probably a similar rule in 1Ed or 2Ed, but I don't feel like looking it up at 3AM.)

So, the seriously wounded fighter (down to about 5% of his max total) all alone in the woods without magical healing will be:

1) completely fine by morning, if this is 4Ed.

2) probably still in trouble in 3.5Ed (or previous editions), and will likely be so for some time.

 

[Rogue Agent]

I missed this earlier, somehow(I blame the pagebreak). I think I can answer this one for you. The disconnect I have here is that you are equating the loss of HP with wounds, but these wounds have no mechanical or story impact, by RAW, other than making the next blow more likely to be (narrated as) fatal. This means that any meaningful narrative and/or consequences of these wounds begins and ends in your hands already. So, why is it then that you are unwilling to hold onto that narrative when the HP is restored? The hp damage only ever served as a rough guideline by which you narrated the getting of wounds. It never handled any consequence of the wound. You were doing that yourself already. So, why not just still do that?

This is true. Large chunks of 4E aren't roleplaying mechanics. You have to accept that mechanics like this have no association with the game world whatsoever. If you can do that, of course, the game works just fine.

But I tend to have problems with this because I keep trying to run 4E as a roleplaying game. When I do that, though, these mechanics are a huge impediment because I can never figure out how to describe the game world without having the mechanics contradict me five seconds later.

In the specific case of wound systems, I've never liked any system in which shooting someone with a gun causes a vague "maybe you got hit, maybe you just dodged and winded yourself really bad" resource depletion. (The old VP/WP system for Star Wars D20 suffered the same problem.) The mechanic doesn't make any sense in the context of the game world, so it inherently prevents me from roleplaying.

When I'm running games, I've got less of a problem with an explicit luck mechanic (where the character has a limited supply of luck for turning otherwise successful blows into unsuccessful blows). At least I know how to describe the outcome.

But 4E's hit-point-and-surge system just leaves me in the position of being unable to describe anything. Can't describe it as wound, because then somebody curing it by shouting at the character doesn't make any sense. Can't describe it as a lucky miss, because then somebody tending the nonexistent wound with a Heal check doesn't make any sense.

In pre-4E a depletion of hit points always represented a physical wound. The exact nature of that physical wound was completely nonspecific and could vary from character to character -- but it was always a physical wound. And while the cure spells might get a little wacky if you look at them too closely in terms of how much physical healing they provided, all of the mechanics in the game reflected that every hit point lost was part of some physical wound inflicted on the character.

By way of metaphor, pre-4E hit points were like a bank account that inexplicably allows you to put in different currencies, simply total up the number of bills you deposited, and then withdraw that numeric value in whatever currency you'd like. A little weird if you think about it too hard, but at least it was all money. 4E hit points are more like a Schroedinger's piggy bank -- sometimes you put in a gold nugget and it comes out a gold nugget; sometimes you put in a bread crumb and it comes out a squirrel.

I find the whole discussion of "well, no edition of the game ever modeled the debilitating effects from wounds (until you got to 0 hp or thereabouts)" kind of a red herring. I may or may not care if a system doesn't model something (no system worth playing is going to include a defecation mechanic; they're always inherently incomplete). My problem is when the system models something that isn't there. I dunno what to do with that in the context of a roleplaying game.

In your experience the difference between days and one day may be pretty big, but given that there is no tenable reason for wounds to be the case, only verve, it seems very much arbitrary to me how long one waits.

To address this in another way: From my POV, the verve explanation of hit points never made any sense. It apparently did for some people who don't really care about dissociated mechanics, and that's great. But it didn't make any sense to me.

Fortunately, pre-4E, there was another explanation of hit points that made perfect sense to me.

But in 4E the only explanation that makes any sense is the verve explanation. Irrelevant to you if you were always comfortable with the verve explanation. But a huge frickin' deal for me and anyone else for whom the verve explanation doesn't make sense.

 

[pemerton]

[MENTION=19675]Dannyalcatraz[/MENTION], that is a rule for recovering hit points. But it is not a rule for recovering wounds.

When the fighter has partially recovered his/her hit points, s/he can function without impairment (subect to some corner cases in 3E's fatigue rules, which don't exist in AD&D). Is this because s/he is now unwounded, or because s/he is wounded but is not impaired by those wounds due to herioc vigour/luck, or because s/he is wounded but the wounds are minor and non-impairing? The rules don't say.

When the fighter has fully recovered his/her hit points, s/he can function without impairment. Is this because s/he is now unwounded, or because s/he is wounded but is not impaired by those wounds due to herioc vigour/luck, or because s/he is wounded but the wounds are minor and non-impairing? The rules don't say.

The only difference between these two cases is that the fighter who has not recovered all his/her hit points is, due to the way the combat mechanics work, more likely to have the next blow suffered be a fatal one. That is, her heroic verve is reduced. (This cannot even be attributed to fatigue, and a correspondingly reduced ability to dodge/parry, because saving throws, attack rolls, open door rolls, etc are not impaired as they would be by such fatigue.)

So every edition of D&D definitely has rules for recovering hit points. But, other than AD&D 1st ed's death's door rules, there are no rules that I know of for recovering from wounds.

 

[Pentius]

This is true. Large chunks of 4E aren't roleplaying mechanics.

I think you mean, "Large chunks of 4e aren't simulation mechanics." The mechanics work within a roleplaying game just fine. They just don't, on their own, tell you what exactly the narrative is(I don't hold that pre-4e HP did this, either).

To put it another way, maybe the HP=wounds explanation of HP made sense to those who don't care about disassociated mechanics, and that's great. But it doesn't make any sense to me.

 

[Samurai]

My question is this: Are there any other games out there in which a character can go from bleeding out on the ground, literally seconds away from dying, to full HP in just a 5 minute short rest, by himself, without magic or special regeneration powers of any kind? There is only 1 game I can think of that has that... Toon:

Are there any others? Pretty much every other RPG I know of has recovery times for hps.

 

[JamesonCourage]

It kind of helps. All of these are based on a lot of meta-game knowledge that I recognize does impact play a lot. Still, just as low recovery time opens the new path of reacting slowly, it cuts off the old path of reacting quickly.

Which is why I like something like 3.X, which allows for both. If you have 100 hit points as a 10th level Fighter, you heal back 10 HP each night. If you take 10 damage, you can press on and be fine (thus you have the narrative path* of still reacting quickly). However, if you take 70 damage, it'll take a week of healing, which means you're debating what to do now. It presents more narrative paths*, as you can press on and be fine (low damage), or have a longer-lasting wound (mechanical HP damage, whatever) and a dilemma (high damage). I want a system that allows for both options.

* Narrative path = story branch.

The mechanics can't suggest both as the best course of action. That suggests to me that it is a wash. Maybe the precise path of restoring HP slower is preferable to you, and that's fine, but that undercuts the prevailing argument that we who switch to 4e have lost a huge swath of narrative ground. Rather, it suggests we've made a trade-off of one path for another, which is much harder to assign a value judgement to.

It's only meta-game knowledge if there's no "serious" wounds (that is, HP damage is counted as a light wound that degrades your health in one way -you can take less punishment). There's been a debate on that, but I haven't really joined in yet.

Yeah, I get that people like the way it works. I said I don't like the way it works, and why I don't. I wasn't trying to convince anyone. Because, as always, play what you like