I argue it. I've played countless hours of 4e D&D, and even more countless hours of Rolemaster. Damage dealing, and recovery, are more complex in RM than in 4e D&D. This is despite the fact that, in RM, none of the healing mechanics represent multiple different things.
And I certainly don't find interpreting all hit point loss as physical injury simple at all, because it produces absurdities in the fiction that then muck everything up. Whereas, playing 4e, understanding hp recovery via the use of effects such as Healing Word, Inspiring Word, Word of Vigour, Lay on Hands and the like never caused problems at my table.
A character who is set back by fireball - by the heat, perhaps the burns, etc - recovers their resilience when a Warlord speaks an Inspiring Word, or when a paladin gives of their own being via a Lay on Hands. Nothing obliges us to imagine that any burns are gone. But they no longer set the character back. In film, my conception of this is the dream sequence in The Two Towers, in which Aragorn is brought back to life by the licking of his loyal horse. This does not cure whatever injuries he sustained falling over the cliff. But it does restore his resolve, enabling him to go on. 4e D&D, in this respect at least, has a highly sentimental orientation - its whole system for recovery rests on the premise that any setback can be recovered from if a character has sufficient conviction and support from allies. It has more in common, in this respect, with LotR than (say) The Maltese Falcon.
Also, just FYI, the notion of "positive energy" isn't part of 4e D&D. It does have a notion of radiant damage, but the Healing Word prayer does not have the radiant keyword.
We're not talking about Rolemaster, though, and since the examination of D&D's hit points isn't a comparative quality with other RPGs, we can overlook that. Likewise, if you find having one mechanic potentially represent two different things (which it leaves up to the players to interpret) as somehow less complex than that same mechanic being only representative of one different thing, then I'm not sure what to tell you, except that you're arguing something that strikes me as self-evidently inarguable with no basis in rationality that I can see. You might not find that increased complexity to be all that much of a problem, but saying that an additional level of interpretation being off-loaded onto the players
is more complex isn't really a matter of opinion, as it has the people interacting with the game necessarily performing an extra step that they wouldn't need to be doing if the game was doing that step already.
4e does not draw any distinction of the sort you are making up here, and so the issue does not arise in 4e play. If your character is not dead, then they are not "so badly burned" that they cannot keep going by virtue of their heroic resolve and the urgings of their companions.
The fact that 4E is blind to this distinction is the very problem I'm outlining, as it's offloaded that distinction to the players, who then have to go through the extra mental gymnastics in order to make sense of things. Again, if the DM and/or players narrate the fireball's damage as physical injury, and that the hit points recovered are resilience, and that further hit points lost are
also injury, then all of a sudden you have a cognitive gap, as the game is now indicating that the character is alive despite having led the players down what was up until that point a valid interpretation that they should be dead.
Hence, the issue
does arise in 4E play, even if "arise" means that you're making the necessary adjustments in game to avoid such a blatant contradiction. Again, resolving the issue means acknowledging that it's an issue in the first place.
You are making up assumptions that are not part of the game.
Except I've already demonstrated that those assumptions are already part of the course of play, it's just that the game is off-loading the trouble of dealing with them onto the players.
@Aldarc and I already quoted the rules text upthread, from the 4e PHB, that tells us what a
miss means. It doesn't mean what you say here.
Yes, and like Gygax's essay back in AD&D 1E, its insistence on a particular definition doesn't mean that the actual operations necessarily work the way it's insisting they work. Hence the problem, as yet unresolved, of players legitimately interpreting various operations of hit point loss as being injury, likewise legitimately interpreting hit point recovery as being resilience, and then having to navigate the problem of the character having taken more "injury hp" loss than is survivable, yet still being alive because of "resilience hp" recovery.
And there is no assumption, in the game, that a fireball is literally affecting the entirety of a character's space such they they can't avoid it. In fact the game presents, and treats, both the weapon attack and the elemental AoE as identical except that the AoE can affect more targets.
Again, that's because that assumption is being off-loaded onto the players; 4E is so gamist that it simply doesn't want to acknowledge that level of in-character representation, which means that the players have to (at least, if they care about that level of engagement at all; and to be fair not everyone does).
When the game is played in accordance with its rule, it does not present contradictions or incoherence. What it does present, as I already posted just upthread, is a world in which heroes, even those who are severely set back by the physical or mental attacks of their opponents, are able to press on and recover from that setback provided they have sufficient inner resolve and the support of their allies.
This fiction may be too sentimental for some tastes, but it is not incoherent.
See above, the incoherence is that the game is one that's quite content to sit back and, by its own (limited) presentation of what's happening, lead the players down a path where they can assume that the same operation is two different things, which can result in a cognitive gap in terms of what's happening. At this point, you're saying that you have fireballs that don't burn people, despite them causing fire damage, so I suppose that won't be convincing to you, but to most other people I'm aware of that interpretation is axiomatic.
That can heal severe wounds? (On low level characters.)
Which at least establishes that wounds are being cured, and so you don't run into instances of characters having repeatedly taken injuries which they're ignoring thanks to "resilience restoration" despite the cumulative total of their injuries being above what they should be able to survive, in terms of hit points lost.
Sleeping one's arm back on, one's bones back together, and one's viscera back into place?
That's still far better than shouting encouraging words at someone to make them temporarily regenerate their wounds shut.
The idea that "I know that I'm injured", but know nothing of where, or how; and this ostensible injury does not actually have any significance to play - it doesn't impede me, or make me more vulnerable, or require any special approach to treatment or recovery - seems utterly empty to me.
Which is fine; as I noted elsewhere, plenty of people can step over a broken stair, or fix it without any sort of significant effort on their part, etc. But it's still a broken stair that you have to deal with somehow. Likewise, the "it can't be injuries, because there's no loss of prowess" argument is an appeal to realism (which is distinct from verisimilitude), which D&D has never been concerned with.
