So I take it that, when you play AD&D, Cure Light Wounds can't help a badly-wounded character?
Or do you just ignore the flavour text?
I really don't know what you mean here; of course a
cure light wounds can help a badly-wounded character, it restores 1d8 hit points' worth of injuries that the character has taken.
Now, what I
think you're saying here (and please feel free to let me know if I'm misunderstanding you) is a
tu quoque fallacy about how 4E's cognitive gap caused by its tying multiple in-character processes to a single mechanic is somehow less egregious because, in AD&D, characters gaining more hit points as they level up means that the flat hit points restored by a healing spell results in said spells become less effective as they level up. That's a problem, to be sure, but it doesn't make what 4E does any less egregious in-and-of itself. Which is just part of why so many people didn't care for that edition.
4e D&D comes right out and says that the flavour text in power descriptions is epiphenomenal. I certainly don't care about the flavour text for Healing Word. But suppose that you do, then you can treat the power as working just the same as Lay on Hands - the receiving character gives of their own reserves, and the gods heal them in return. That's not incoherent at all.
Yeah, no. If you're referring to the section on flavor text in the "How to Read a Power" section of the PHB, what it says is:
A power’s flavor text helps you understand what happens when you use a power and how you might describe it when you use it. You can alter this description as you like, to fit your own idea of what your power looks like. Your wizard’s magic missile spell, for example, might create phantasmal skulls that howl through the air to strike your opponent, rather than simple bolts of magical energy.
I suppose your reading might vary, but to me (and, I'd be willing to bet, to most other people), that looks more like changing the cosmetic aspects of the spell, rather than altering the in-character process that's actually being performed. You can say that a
cure light wounds spell heals by causing rapid regeneration, rather than a divine light which makes new blood and tissue out of nothing, but to say that it means
healing word isn't actually healing anything but is simply making the target creature recover some stamina strikes me as going beyond what the above passage means. The first sentence, in that regard, is the most salient; the flavor text is giving you the in-character understanding of what a power does.
Of course, you absolutely can change things in the context of your home game; the ability to "hack" or otherwise alter parts of the game in a DIY approach has long been one of the major draws of TTRPGs. But that doesn't change that, as it presents itself, 4E is making it very clear how the
healing word power functions: in a way that's mechanically identical to the warlord's inspiring word, while being quite different from an in-character standpoint.
