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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6052002" data-attributes="member: 996">Actually, if you lose a surge when you are out of surges, you take your surge value in hp damage.  Very early in 4e that was not the case, and it made a final-encounter-of-a-tough-day with some surge-draining wraiths surprisingly easy in that second module, Thuderspire Labyrinth.  Since then, that rule has been 'fixed,' and 'surge loss' is as potentially deadly as hp loss, just with less granularity.  It's always been possible to heal up between encounters, it just took a lot of your cleric's daily spells.  In 3e the amount of between combat healing available went up dramatically at some point because the magic item creation rules were cracked in a few places, but it was pointedly never fixed, and that changed the dynamic of the game a bit.  4e greatly increased between-combat healing with daily resources - plentiful surges everyone contributed, and optional & much less plentiful non-surge healing from the leaders.Hps have always been a poor model for very serious injury because hp loss carries no penalties.  If you're rapidly bleeding to death you're going to become light-headed and weak and drop before you die.  Until you're KO'd hp loss doesn't cause ongoing damage in any ed, so hp loss can't even represent wounds serious enough to cause rapid blood loss.  Similarly, broken limbs, severed tendons and the like will greatly reduce your mobility, but no amount of hp loss does that.  So hps can't even represent that severity of wound, at all - and such wounds aren't even necessarily immediately life-threatening.So your 'problem' with 4e & 5e is actually one of those long-standing problems with D&D, one that even 4e didn't try to fix.5e, though, has the opportunity to do so by adding some sort of optional wound delivery and tracking system, complete with long recovery times and death-spiral penalties if so desired.  If we could maybe leave off bashing 4e from time to time, and instead try to learn from its successes, there's even a pretty good candidate for such a system.  4e uses a tracking system to handle the progression of or recovery from diseases.  That system could be trivially adapted to track a wound that gives an initial penalty in combat, can 'realistically' worsen or even become fatal, or slowly heal over the course of days.  And, since it doesn't use hps, such wounds can't be shouted or casually magicked away - though rituals or spells (if you want to trivialize wounds when the right caster is available) to do so could be included in the module.</blockquote>

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