Take the Narrative Wounding Challenge.

[Herremann the Wise]

Since we're nit picking the crap out of stuff - Luke doesn't actually kill the Wampus. He cuts off its arm, but it's not dead. Heck, it would be just as easy to use a daily, bloody the target and then an Intimidate check to end the fight.

You read my post clearly showing that 3.x could do the Wampa scene and yet this was the first thing that jumped out to you? I thought you might have at least acknowledged that 3.x is pretty flexible. In regards to this nit pick though, I can generally buy that the force can do some pretty crazy things but I didn't think 4e was supposed to be designed for "defeating" a creature (let alone a solo) by a single character in a single round. This however was not exactly the point of your example though.

Oh, and since we're actually going to use the rules:

Lets. Just previous to the "knocking creatures unconscious rule" you site is this which puts it perfectly into context:

Monsters and characters controlled by the Dungeon Master usually die when they reach 0 hit points, unless you choose to knock them out (see “Knocking Creatures Unconscious”)...
When you reduce a creature to 0 hit points or fewer, you can choose to knock it unconscious rather than kill it. Until it regains hit points, the creature is unconscious but not dying. Any healing makes the creature conscious. If the creature doesn’t receive any healing, it is restored to 1 hit point and becomes conscious after a short rest.

My own perspective on this is that this rule is purely designed for the PCs only and not something for monsters to access. The rule is referring to "you" which implies the PCs only. As well, as my monsters don't have the "insta-kill PC" option, I'm not too sure they should automatically get access to the "knocking unconscious" option either, although this is a really easy houserule to allow I will concede.

There, easy peasy.

With a houserule in my opinion. Dare I point you back to your own words: "fail... try again".

Anyway, the point of my post was to show that 3.x facilitates the Wampa scene while 4e RAW does not facilitate it as easily as you would have thought... and I think I showed that pretty clearly.

Best Regards
Herremann the Wise

 

[Herremann the Wise]

And additionally you devil you:

That scene cannot be done in 3e. In 3e, once you've gone below zero hp, you're done. It's been argued very eloquently that a character that drops below zero is most likely going to die, but, even if he stabilized, he still couldn't fight. But, with healing surges, Luke rolls well on his death save and he's back in the game.

UNSBLOCKed: Unless people want to start arguing that the Wampus is doing subdual damage. But, honestly, I think that's just ridiculous.

There, easy peasy. The wampus kept Luke alive because he'd "keep" in the larder longer.

And even if you do allow the houserule, I think you might be failing your own words in regards to the challenge set down and not reducing the Wampa's lethality. Is it that ridiculous that the Wampa would be doing subdual (nonlethal in 3e or houseruled "knocking unconscious" easy peasy-ness in 4e)? I suppose if you say so.

Best Regards
Herremann the Wise

 

[Hungry Like The Wolf]

Pre-4E the fighter would still need days of rest or else he would need to find an actual source of healing. He would need SOME narrative element of healing. With surges he springs back to completely unwounded from anything.

Excuse me if it's come up before but what exactly is stopping surges from being that hypothetical narrative element of healing? I really don't see the difference between a healing potion, cleric or surge except that the former two have specific and constraint narrative descriptions whilst the latter does not.

 

[Hussar]

Is it really a house rule to apply this? Character fails his three death saves and the DM rules that the blow renders you unconscious, rather than dead?

Seems a pretty fair application of the rules to me. After all, we've apparently no problem with saying that hit point loss causes infection in 3e, so, I'd think this was a pretty minor one as house rules go.

 

[Hussar]

Excuse me if it's come up before but what exactly is stopping surges from being that hypothetical narrative element of healing? I really don't see the difference between a healing potion, cleric or surge except that the former two have specific and constraint narrative descriptions whilst the latter does not.

I think, IMO, this nails it very specifically on the head. For some people, it's the fact that the mechanics define the narrative that makes it attractive. The players cannot define the narrative, beyond initiating actions, and all resolutions are defined by the mechanics.

Apparently this is what is described as a huge narrative area that I'm just not seeing, despite the virtual lack of actual examples. I've often kinda wondered how having the narrative pre-defined by the mechanics amounts to narrative freedom.

After all, you have two options without healing surges:

1. The character is wounded, receives no help, and will always take a serious wound that takes time to heal.
2. The character is wounded, receives magical healing and the wounds can be narrated in any fashion you like since they vanish within minutes.

At no point can a character ever take a minor wound, and every hit must actually be a physical injury. After all, if it wasn't, why wouldn't it come back the next day? Are we going to argue that luck has a specific recharge rate?

 

[technoextreme]

Ok. Nothing in the OP counters that.

You say you want believability. You also claim that 4e strips that away.

So, put your money where your mouth is. I'm not a doctor. I have no real idea how long stuff takes to heal, other than a pretty good idea that anything like this:



takes a HELL of a lot longer than days to heal. We're talking months, if not never for that wound to be recovered. So, by the criteria in the OP, this one's a bust. There's just no way anyone's going to buy that an attack that rips through BONE is, in any way, recoverable in days.

So, Bedrockgames, let's see if you're up to the challenge. The claim is on the table that the narrative space used to be much broader and that 4e has made it impossible to narrate the way people want to.

My point is, people's idea of "narration" was pretty much completely divorced from the mechanics anyway, so, how is this much different in 4e?

Actually, I've seen someone get up from that type of injury in about fifteen to twenty minutes. It doesn't happen all that often because most people are relatively sane individuals but when it does holy crap its amazing what you can shrug off with a bit of painkillers.
EDIT:
Ooo yeah. To beat your challenge cracked ribs and a punctured lung.

 

[Herremann the Wise]

Is it really a house rule to apply this?

Most certainly yes. I just checked my Rules Compendium rather than PHB and they changed you to Adventurer:

Knocking Creatures Unconscious
When an adventurer reduces a monster or a DM-controlled character to 0 hit points, he or she can choose to knock the creature unconscious rather than kill it. Until it regains hit points, the creature is unconscious but not dying. Any healing makes the creature conscious.

So yeah, you used mechanics that veered into definite houserule territory and thus you get the "Hussar": Fail... please try again.

Character fails his three death saves and the DM rules that the blow renders you unconscious, rather than dead?

Used cheaply, it becomes a cheap backstop for avoiding unwanted deaths. [Note the using of cheap here is meaning without player consent. With player consent however, it becomes a neat houserule and tool for negotiating the narrative. Kind of like Warhammer 3e's defeated options.]

As there is no "nonlethal" damage in 4e, I think using this houserule for certain nonlethal attacks makes a lot of sense. It means you don't have the hassle of tracking a separate set of hit points and can have challenging encounters that can defeat the party without a TPK. For certain attacks it makes sense that they deal a more nonlethal-style of damage; give them a [nonlethal] damage type keyword. These attacks then allow for 3 saves (obviously you wouldn't call them "death" saves) and thus allow you to spring back in but if failed mean that it is short rest time (or any healing) before you can regain consciousness. So on the positive side, I think it is a fair houserule that adds a good option into the game that 4e does not currently have.

Seems a pretty fair application of the rules to me.

For you to say this, either:
a) You have had the extreme benefit of never having to have suffered rules lawyers in your game
b) You completely ignore them anyway.

While that outlook is somewhat refreshing, it does mean however that you have doubly failed your own Wampa challenge. Firstly having to resort to a houserule or extreme probability to mechanically support the narrative, and secondly because that houserule defies the goalposts you initially set down. You thought it was ridiculous that the Wampa would be dealing subdual (actually nonlethal) damage as this would be the easiest way for 3e to mechanically provide the required narrative. Seeking to deny 3e the easy win, you have then forgotten/ignored this exact stipulation with your own easy peasy explanation successfully moving the goalposts in one direction, before allowing a houserule and thus moving the goalposts in another. As the host of this thread, is that really fair?

After all, we've apparently no problem with saying that hit point loss causes infection in 3e, so, I'd think this was a pretty minor one as house rules go.

I thought the infection discussion by JC while somewhat strained to your ears was exploring a completely grey area where the 3e rules were silent. As such, I would have to concede that his ideas could not be automatically dismissed. With your houserule situation though, the rules are like pretty much all the rules in 4e: specific and crystal clear.

I suppose in 3e if you had a PC who was in the negatives and through luck both good and poor could not achieve consciousness for several days, you could pull out the "infection" description as a reason why they were seemingly not healing and thus staying in a state where death was a constant threat.

Best Regards
Herremann the Wise

 

[Herremann the Wise]

Pre-4E the fighter would still need days of rest or else he would need to find an actual source of healing. He would need SOME narrative element of healing. With surges he springs back to completely unwounded from anything.

Excuse me if it's come up before but what exactly is stopping surges from being that hypothetical narrative element of healing? I really don't see the difference between a healing potion, cleric or surge except that the former two have specific and constraint narrative descriptions whilst the latter does not.

I suppose the essence of this, is that it all comes down to magic. Being a fantasy world, we can accept that magic can do anything including instantly healing people from the most horrific, jaw-droppingly descriptive injuries. It is perhaps that magic can do such extreme things that makes it feel so special in-game (although I will concede that the 37th zapping of a magical healing wand has most probably lost it's magical lustre long ago). However and even still, while having lost its narrative impact, it still remains an important cog in providing a broad spectrum of possible damage descriptions for the DM.

Without magic though, the freedom of the DM to access the full spectrum of damage descriptions begins to dry up. Because 4e has hyper-boosted the probability that any PC can regularly get up from unconsciousness without any assistance let alone mundane assistance, and can be within "full capacity" within 6 hours, the DMs access to that spectrum becomes centralized around non-serious wounds; with the denying of anything more serious than could be completely bounced back from in a potential 6 hours.

I don't think there is anything wrong with surges as a valid resource currency (and thus why my activity on the other thread has been only a couple of comments). What I don't like though are the rules that have been used around surges to artificially expedite the adventuring process. If someone is unconscious, then I don't think they should be making any miraculous recoveries within a round; I think the 4e unconscious condition begins to tread on the 4e stunned condition in this regard. I think it is also worth noting that being unconscious in 3e is more severe than it is in 4e (you’re helpless, you take a –5 penalty to all defenses, you can’t take actions, you fall prone, if possible and you can’t flank an enemy.) I suppose unconsciousness in 4e is really just a glorified "stunned" condition until you fail three death saves or go into bloodied-negatives. However it is this polar granularity that makes it difficult to describe anything in the middle of death and flesh wound and thus the big hole in the narrative spectrum that a number of (but not all) posters notice.

While 3e is far from perfect, particularly in regards to healing, it theoretically allows and mechanically supports a greater variety of serious wounding while from a practical perspective, due to the ready access of magical healing, the sky is usually the limit in regards to how ridiculous you can make your damage descriptions and not have them contradicted by the resulting narrative.

Essentially, surges for all their infinite freedom and possibilities have to thus satisfy a greater number of conditions for narrative consistency where as divine class or divine item healing because of its magical nature gets the autopass and does not disrupt the resulting narrative.

4e is easily house-ruled though in this specific regard.
If for example you said that only "magical" healing could allow a surge to be spent when a character was in the negatives, then that would satisfy that issue.
If you said that surges are only returned at a certain rate rather than completely with an extended rest, then you fix most likely the biggest issue some people have with the usually expeditious restoration of surges.
If you used the disease track as an injury track so that an injured character had to act injured (think ability score damage in 3e), then I think you have a very flexible tool to describe and mechanically support exactly the narrative you want (and this tool would be a significant improvement over what 3.x typically offers).

With this being so easy, why then is this still a problem for many people when looking at 4e as a play option? Because the people who would look to do this, would also look to houserule minions, certain narratively inconsistent powers, conditions that don't relate well with the mechanics representing them and dozens of other places where the fluency (and they would say hyper-fluency) of the game has taken precedence over what they believe the mechanics of the game should be representing. There's just too much "bashing" of the rules into their style. The black box mentality to rules design (which I think is at the heart of most of these issues) works for some but certainly not for others.

Best Regards
Herremann the Wise

PS: Hello from a fellow Sydney-ite by the way.

 

[Hungry Like The Wolf]

...

PS: Hello from a fellow Sydney-ite by the way.

Herman, you are making some pretty big assumptions here. Healing surges are pretty androgynous. What is stopping them from having both mundane and magical connotations? Because of said androgyny, there is nothing stopping them from being magical, in fact they cover both magical (healing potions and cleric spells) as well as mundane mechanical functions (second wind).

If anything, surges are more supportive of narrative functions than purely magically constraint mechanics.

Enjoy the rain yesterday? Summer weather is coming eh?

 

[Herremann the Wise]

Herman, you are making some pretty big assumptions here. Healing surges are pretty androgynous. What is stopping them from having both mundane and magical connotations? Because of said androgyny, there is nothing stopping them from being magical, in fact they cover both magical (healing potions and cleric spells) as well as mundane mechanical functions (second wind).

I just realised that you have most likely preserved your sanity in some way by not reading your whole way through this thread. Looking back at my post, the important context here (that I have held to throughout the discussion but only inferred rather than explicitly stated again) is the issues I have with 4e when going into negative hit points. In other words, when a character is not only bloodied but knocked out and in peril of death. I have no issue with the use of healing surges be they mundane, magical or otherwise if the PC has a positive number of hit points and in fact believe that they add something to the game under these circumstances that has not been supported in earlier editions (my very first 4e character was a warlord for that reason; to play around with this narrative space as a player).

And so the only assumption I think I have made in my reply to you is within the context of a character going into the negatives and how surges are used and restored under those circumstances and the dance as DM I have to do to not describe something that could be contradicted by events not yet determined. Generally in 3e (despite some major issues I have with healing and hit points in general there), I did not have to be quite so conservative with my descriptions. If you can read your way through the thread, you will garner the best understanding of my thoughts and understandings on the matter. Otherwise, a context of "when going into negatives" will have to suffice. Does this assist?

If anything, surges are more supportive of narrative functions than purely magically constraint mechanics.

In the positives, I agree , in the negatives 4e gives me some unwanted headaches.

Essentially the problem is this:
- Character goes into negatives and they are unconscious. How confident am I of describing a serious wound? [It is the narrative space taken up by serious wounds that are not fatal that is in question here. 3e partially supports this while 4e RAW in my experience and understanding offers no mechanical support or justification for serious injury].
- Lets say I pull out the serious injury description because the PC has gone pretty deep into the negatives. In 3e if left completely alone without any healing assistance, the PC has an incredibly likely chance to die because they have 3 sets of hoops to dance through as mentioned earlier in the thread to avoid death. From this perspective, I feel almost obliged to describe a serious injury. In 4e if left completely alone, the character is either going to die pretty quickly (3 fails before a 20) or they are going to be able to save, second wind and completely recover, or short rest and fully recover within as little as 6 hours extended rest. Because I might not have the fabric of magic to hide behind, if I do describe a serious injury, there's a good chance that my description is going to get contradicted (particularly with a warlord present).

Now I can hide behind a further description of "the injury wasn't as bad as what you all feared" once or twice but to have to do this every single time it happens starts to feel like a glitch with the rules. The narrative range of damage descriptions that can be completely ignored within 6 hours to a day is not that much (and certainly less than 3e). In practice in 3.x, I feel a much wider spectrum of damage descriptions is available, not only because of the raw mechanics but also through the abundance of powerful healing magic (and the complete unobtrusiveness or practical non-performing of mundane healing). While the overall narrative of such consistent magical healing is not exactly to my taste either, it does give me the scope and confidence as DM to describe a wider range of injuries - which was the point of this thread, where as the other thread was more focused on a dislike of surges. Again, does that help explain my thoughts?

I have an open mind so if you can show me something that points to ways out of this that I have not thought of, I'm all ears.

Enjoy the rain yesterday? Summer weather is coming eh?

That it is... and then you have a cold day like today and forecasts of high 30's for next weekend. The weather just seems all over the place at the moment. (I live in Picnic Point and work in Ingleburn by the way so my weather experiences might be a little skewed compared to yours but heh).

Thanks anyway for the continued discussion.

Best Regards
Herremann the Wise