There are many movies with similar scenes where the injured person proceeds to die anyway, which is more realistic. Without some medical assistance or supernatural healing, someone who is critically injured is not going to jump up and back into the fray. Do you see athletes that get a leg broken in a game jump back into the game because the coach told them to walk it off? Absolutely not! So why should a warlord be able to do it?
4e Annoyances for those who like 4e
- Thread starter hailstop
- Start date
Jeremy Ackerman-Yost
Explorer
Because it's cinematic and fun, and we are playing a game that is explicitly about larger than life heroes.
Jack99
Adventurer
Maybe, maybe not. I know there has been plenty of example of athletes who have finished games with broken bones. Whether it was the coach or themselves is of course arguable but hard to prove either way.
It doesn't have to be a broken limb, that's just an example of the most extreme injury you'd typically see in non-motorized sports. It could be any serious injury. Regarding Jack99's comment, I'm not talking about a hairline fracture that can be ignored with enough adrenaline. I mean a serious fracture. They don't walk it off, they get carted away on a stretcher. I would equate this to "dying" D&D. You cannot walk off something that serious because someone tells you to. You cannot reconcile the dying condition with fatigue, or being out of luck points, poor morale or hurt feelings, etc (which all supposedly represent hit points in 4E. It seems as if an enemy sneezes in your direction, you take damage). It's not called "not wanting to fight" or even "not able to fight". It's called "dying". If they want PC's to never be dying, but just not able to fight, they really need to rethink the terminology. But then again, without the threat of death, it's not that heroic a game anymore. Who cares if you made a heroic stand against the dragon, if it never has even the slightest chance of killing you?
hero4hire
Explorer
If that type of realism is what you want in a game I can definitely see why it annoys you.
I prefer the cinematic "Shake it off soldier it's just a flesh wound!" approach myself.
The way I see it, hit points represent your character's will to live, and the D&D world is one in which spiritual forces play a much larger role than they do in our own.
In the real world, if you're bleeding out, it doesn't really matter how much you want to live. The medical facts are what they are, and when your blood pressure is too low to supply oxygen to your brain, it's lights out for you. (Although you might be able to muster the determination to put on a tourniquet or something, where a less motivated person would just lie back and croak.)
In the D&D world, if you're bleeding out, sheer determination can keep you alive. You can actually will your body to keep going when it should by rights be dying or dead. That can mean you survive a wound that should have killed you. (It can also mean the wound does kill you, but three days later your animated corpse claws its way up out of the ground.)
[SIZE=-2]...I don't entirely buy this argument, but it works well enough that I can gloss over the problem in my own head. Mostly.[/SIZE]
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Tallifer
Hero
Because many of us do not want to roleplay the news at five o'clock, we want to roleplay the other movies or mediaeval literature where the hero surges back to his feet despite his injuries and finishes the fight.
The thing is for me, in movies, comic books, epic poems and fantasy novels, the narrative controls whether the hero dies or not. The author writes whatever fulfils the demands of the plot or matches the fate of the character. Dungeons and dragons is a form of cooperative authorship (even in a case where all the players do is hack and slash and talk in mechanics, anachronisms and slang).
I can force myself to buy into that up to a point, but when your character is literally dying, that totally breaks suspension of disbelief for me. At that point you really need some supernatural healing for it to be in the realm of believeability.
LostSoul
Adventurer
Shazman, this has always been a problem in D&D - though moreso in 4E.
In earlier editions, you break a leg, a serious break - enough to threaten your life! - and the next day you can run at full speed like it didn't even happen. (You recover some HP after a day's rest, and once you're at 1 HP you're good to go.)
I agree, Warlords make this feature of hit points more obvious.
edit: You could get around this by having the DM say, "Hey, your leg is broken; even though the Warlord is keeping you conscious, you'll need to make a Heal check at the end of the encounter to stay alive, and you're Slowed until your leg actually heals. Inspiring Word can't do that." This is how you'd handle a broken leg in any edition.
It seems like it'd be harder to do that in 4E. Not sure why.
In earlier editions, you break a leg, a serious break - enough to threaten your life! - and the next day you can run at full speed like it didn't even happen. (You recover some HP after a day's rest, and once you're at 1 HP you're good to go.)
I agree, Warlords make this feature of hit points more obvious.
edit: You could get around this by having the DM say, "Hey, your leg is broken; even though the Warlord is keeping you conscious, you'll need to make a Heal check at the end of the encounter to stay alive, and you're Slowed until your leg actually heals. Inspiring Word can't do that." This is how you'd handle a broken leg in any edition.
It seems like it'd be harder to do that in 4E. Not sure why.
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