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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8412684" data-attributes="member: 6790260">While in the heat of battle, Healing Surges are difficult to access. Normally, characters can only make use of one, and doing so costs them a standard action (which is a pretty steep cost in 4e terms). This is actually more similar to how real-world response to trauma works: the body actually has quite a lot of resources at its disposal, but a sudden, intense traumatic event can so badly disrupt your internal homeostatic equilibrium that you're unable to use those resources. They take time to draw out, more than the less-than-a-minute that most combats are supposed to be.Healing potions directly allow the user's body to draw on those reserves. They usually aren't very efficient at it either--they give fixed HP instead of being based on your surge value, so most characters would prefer "proper" healing. But that doesn't mean healing potions are worthless, they're just emergency healing rather than main baseline healing. Drinking one is also a minor action rather than a standard action though, so there may be cases where the weaker potion is worth being able to take some other action too.If you choose to view it that way, that is your prerogative, but there are perfectly cromulent ways of viewing this, ones used in many other games. That is, the HP-vs-surges system is loosely analogous to a "vitality and wounds" system. You can only take X many wounds per day before you're tapped out--anything further could genuinely kill you. And even if you haven't taken that many wounds, if you lose too much vitality all at once, you can die from the sudden, intense trauma. Both of these behaviors model real human beings better than HP do. Humans must maintain homeostasis and have only so much energy they can expend in a given day before fatigue sets in, requiring rest. HP and surges correspond quite closely, in a narrative sense, to (what I would call) "fatigue" vs "exhaustion." Once you're truly exhausted, you have nothing left to give--time to pack it in. Before that point, though, a bit of rest can eliminate temporary fatigue....but only up to a limit.Worth noting: different classes have different numbers of Healing Surges. Fighters, Paladins, and other classes that are, narratively and mechanically, geared for taking hits tend to have high numbers of surges. (Barbarians, for example, are not "Defenders" but have relatively more Surges because they're beefy front-line attackers expecting to take hits.) Wizards have few baseline Healing Surges, because they're bookish nerds. Anyone can get more surges by raising their Constitution (you add your Con mod to your total number of surges), or by taking the Durable feat (gives you two more healing surges).There are also some extremely thematic powers tied into the Healing Surge system, my favorite being the Paladin's Lay on Hands power. It's a daily power, though you can use it a number of times each day equal to your Wisdom modifier (min 1). When you use it, you expend one of your healing surges, and an ally you can touch (or yourself) heals as though they had spent a surge. It is, quite literally, "I give of myself, to replenish you." That's WAY more thematic and flavorful than the incredibly boring "you have a pool of HP to share" mechanic that has been used in other editions. I value examples of gameplay and story integration like this.</blockquote>

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