D&D 4E 4e Healing - Is This Right?

[FitzTheRuke]

Just out of curiosity, for those who keep saying (or buying) that HP are not and have never represented actual injury...

Personally, I think we all agree that HP includes a certain amount of leeway for SOME of it to include injury. But as many posters have pointed out, it's never done it terribly well. We're all pretty sure it never intended to.

Many of us have taken to considering all injury that doesn't kill you to be SUPERFICIAL. Mainly due to the fact that it really IS (it doesn't affect you in any way, other than to day that you are more likely to be killed by a future attack.)

In this way, the ONLY thing it has ever SIMULATED (as opposed to implied, which is up to the player) is a general attrition of your ability to effectively defend yourself.

You, Jeff, have chosen to hinge much of your suspension of disbelief on the notion that the time required to heal indicates the severity of the injury. Personally, I think that's not a bad way to justify 3.5 and earlier editions. Obviously it doesn't work well for 4e.

However, you seem to imply that the other take is invalid, or at least inferior.

That is, the idea that ONLY a shot that actually KILLS you is a significant wound, and anything less is something that can be "sucked up" and gotten over. Certainly healed after a good night's rest. That is how WE justify the fact that you can fight at full capacity while at 1HP: You really aren't injured in any significant way.

So the smashed nose from the gauntlet is certainly possible both ways. You're not gonna die from it. The orc's blade wound will bind up tight with bandages. And when you crack the bettle's carapice it fights on until you kill it.

Both ways work.

Fitz

 

[Sashi]

I'm trying to understand what you don't like about the system, and as far as I can tell it's this:

"Only because there's no way to model longer-lasting injuries in 4E. "
And from other things you've said, your problem is the following:

In 3.x a 5th level character has 100 hp, he takes 80 damage but only receives 30 healing. He rests overnight, recovers 10 more HP, and is now at 50 HP and in need of further healing or more bed rest.

In 4E a 5th level character has 100 hp, he takes 80 damage but only receives 30 healing. He rests overnight and is now fully healed.

You want there to be that carryover of damage, you want people to be going around saying "oof! yesterday really took it out of me". Here's the problem:

A wand of Lesser Vigor costs 750 gp and heals 500 hp
Cure Light Wounds is 750gp for 100-450 hp, average 250

That's 1.5gp/hp, or 3gp/hp if you aren't allowed to cheese Lessor Vigor. The cost of healing up that 50 hp difference between 3.x and 4th ed is 75-150 gp.

In 3.x a 5th level character is supposed to have a net worth of 9,000 GP. The cost of becoming fully healed is the same as an accountancy error in the character's net worth. And don't forget that as you use consumables you're supposed to be compensated for them (that's not a net worth of "9,000 GP minus 150 GP for those 3 potions you drank at 1st level" it's flat-out 9k gp).

If you really want 4e characters to not be healed the next day: don't let them rest(1). If you want 3e characters to not be healed each day you have to not let them rest AND deny them access to healing consumables. Heck, by limiting each character's healing to his own resource you even limit some of the forced-march cheese that can happen in 3.x (fatigue is represented as nonlethal damage, which means that a party can run from one end of a continent to the other without ever resting longer than the time it takes a cleric to recover spells at sunrise)

If you want Sam & Frodo to treat every healing surge as precious, then don't let them rest. The uruk-hai move faster and are more numerous, they move in shifts and rest the bare minimum, never giving Sam & Frodo more than an hour's rest before they have to move on. If you want Frodo to have to rest for a week in Rivendell then make it a plot point "You spend a week in the blissful peace of Rivendell recovering from your wounds and seeking the consul of Elrond"(2) I don't need to whack my players with a "you don't get your full HP until you do what I say" stick.



(1) disclaimer, we don't know how consumable magic items are going to be treated in 4E, but can you really imagine a wand of CLW existing in a game where apparently CLW doesn't exist?

(2) Don't forget that Frodo's wound was from the sword of the Nazgul and not even a "regular wound" in the first place. It would be better modeled as some kind of disease or poison.

 

[Jeff Wilder]

I typically use several approaches:

1) Using aforementioned action movie/fantasy hero logic to how those injuries are possible to "tough out" and play through. Then basically ignoring those injuries.

Other than the comcomittant need for rest or magical healing, that's what I do, too.

If you are fond of using specific injury descriptions and you believe that hit points best represent true injuries

I believe HP represent many different things. Among them, injury, if the loss is severe enough to require significant magic or time.

how can you justify those injuries not giving significant (if not crippling) long term effects on character abilities.

See above. They're heroes. But like pretty much all heroes, if really bad things happen to them, they don't bounce back completely in six hours.

Descriptions of opponent and NPC injuries are almost never as significant as those to PCs, as only the PCs typically carry over to the next series of encounters.

They're significant to PCs because they're fun to describe and to imagine as they occur. If the PC is still in fighting shape, he shrugs it off and somehow goes on. If he's not, he calls for a medic or a rest. If it was a serious, hard-won, significant fight, he might need serious magical attention or rest.

The difference is, in 4E there are no serious, hard-won, significant fights ... except the one that kills you. After every other fight, in six hours you're at 100 percent again. That's just not my idea of heroic fantasy. Fantasy, sure. Heroic fantasy, no.

So how come only one person is answering the question about how quick perfect healing has to be to break your suspension of disbelief? Six hours is obviously okay ... but is two hours still okay? Twenty minutes? Five minutes? Can your suspension of disbelief ever be broken by the swiftness of perfect healing?

 

[baberg]

Just out of curiosity, for those who keep saying (or buying) that HP are not and have never represented actual injury, do y'all really not describe (or have described to you), "the crunch of his nose breaking under your spiked gauntlet," or "the spray of blood as the orc's blade bites into your shoulder," or "the audible snap as your mace cracks the beetle's carapace"?

I feel like you're mixing Roll and Role playing. Abstract concepts like HP, THAC0, attributes, and to-hit rolls are all an aspect of the gameplay itself. The rest is the player and DM's imagination about what's actually happening when I just critted that beetle for half its hit points with an axe.

In summary if you dislike the 4th edition rules on HP, don't use 'em. I for one like that we don't need a cleric anymore, and don't need to rest for 4 days to recover wounds from a simple goblin ambush at level 1.

 

[AZRogue]

Let's get to the bottom of it all.

The new healing system is in the game because it facilitates play, not because it simulates healing better. In practice, it just shortens the length of time needed for PCs to be back up and attacking your dungeon.

No version of DnD simulates injury and healing very well, I think we can all agree, but 4E goes even further down this road ... or, at least, further than a lot of people have considered going before.

But the rule helps keep the game moving. That's why it's there. It's not there to aid in simulation because, as WotC has said themselves, 4E is moving away from the simulation colored side of the grid and is in the Gamist side of the grid. Not completely, of course, but enough for balance and gameplay to come before simulation on the priority list.

Which is fine by me. I can think of enough light justification for all of the rules we've seen, and that's all my group or I have ever wanted. One sentence of description and it's settled.

 

[Xethreau]

Has anybody ever heard of ROLEPLAYING?

Seriously, if you take a wound, whether it be a cut, acid burn, or whatever, act it out! If you don't care, the ruleset does not force you to.

Sounds like a good idea to me.

 

[Jeff Wilder]

You, Jeff, have chosen to hinge much of your suspension of disbelief on the notion that the time required to heal indicates the severity of the injury. Personally, I think that's not a bad way to justify 3.5 and earlier editions. Obviously it doesn't work well for 4e.

However, you seem to imply that the other take is invalid, or at least inferior.

Only to the extent that it doesn't provide any way to model long-term injury.

If that is simply not important to you -- if you're okay with the binary states of "perfectly fine" and "dead" -- then it's absolutely not inferior.

I'm not okay with that, and nor are a lot of us. A lot of us want a game that has a heavy tactical combat component to at least model "perfectly fine," "injured, but gimme a week," and "dead." For a game so much about combat, lacking that breaks my suspension of disbelief badly.

Look, I'm not comparing 4E to a videogame (for one thing, a game like Temple of Elemental Evil, for all its faults, does model long-term injury), but one of the reasons I don't play MMORPGs is that they break my suspension of disbelief. The encounter regeneration, the hot elf babe "LOL"ing all over the place and taking about her new two-terabyte drive, and yes, the near-instant healing ... all of those, and more, break my suspension of disbelief to the point that I don't enjoy MMORPGs.

Do I think RPGs are superior? Well, if you define superior as "something I enjoy doing," then obviously. But only in that way. Those of you that enjoy MMORPGs, please do continue to do so. And those of you that will enjoy 4E, please do. Really.

Just don't try to tell me (and I know you, specifically, are not doing so, Fitz) that it's okay that 4E doesn't model long-term injury, because "D&D never has." First, that's simply not true -- D&D has always modeled long-term injury -- and second, it's okay for you.

I admit that I don't understand why it's okay for you -- which doesn't mean I don't understand the arguments, as I very well do, and have been making arguments for abstract HP for longer than most of you have probably been playing -- but that doesn't matter. I don't understand why people enjoying "LOL"ing elf babes, either.

What isn't okay is people continuing to say D&D has never modeled long-term injury. Because it's simply not true. The modeling has been abstract and often damned hokey, but it's been at least a nod in the direction of maintaining verisimilitude. And as I've said in a couple of threads about 4E, I'm easy. I want to suspend my disbelief. Just give me a justification for the 6HM (six-hour miracle), or give me injury that needs magic or time, and I'll be A-OK.

 

[Jeff Wilder]

Let's get to the bottom of it all.

The new healing system is in the game because it facilitates play, not because it simulates healing better. In practice, it just shortens the length of time needed for PCs to be back up and attacking your dungeon.

Absolutely. I agree 100 percent. So ...

Why not just make it five minutes to being perfectly healed?

If the goal is to keep the game moving, to keep the PCs adventuring, to dispense with the downtime sometimes required by the -- *choke* -- more simulationist HP in 3.5, why six hours? Why not five minutes?

 

[baberg]

Absolutely. I agree 100 percent. So ...

Why not just make it five minutes to being perfectly healed?

If the goal is to keep the game movies, to keep the PCs adventuring, to dispense with the downtime sometimes required by the -- *choke* -- more simulationist HP in 3.5, why six hours? Why not five minutes?

Because then every encounter would result in the PCs having every ability at their disposal and there would be zero choice in every encounter.

- I use my once-daily skill that does lots of damage
- I use my encounter skill that does lots of damage
- I use my at-will skill until he's dead.

Lather, rinse, repeat every time. There would be no resource management, no decisions of "Boy, we're getting toasted, but I might need that miracle spell later on in this dungeon" - it would just be dice rolling.

Are you trying to be obtuse and contradictory, or do you honestly just hate 4th healing that much?

 

[Pale Jackal]

Sure it does. Being down HP absolutely models wounds that impair your fighting efficiency. (Well, "fighting ability," anyway. I'm not sure what you mean by "efficiency," here.) All else being equal, when you're down HP you're not able to fight as long. And the very language of the game -- yes, even 4E -- makes it clear that it's at least partially due to wounds. "Healing surge." "Bloodied." And so on.

I agree it's partially due to wounds, but they're superficial.

Ultimately both "camps" of hit points have their flaws: a swordsman capable of suffering more wounds as he levels up doesn't work for me, at least not at the rate D&D represents hit points. Capable of fighting with no wound penalties at 1 HP doesn't work for me either.

Fatigue doesn't work completely either, since you don't suffer any HP loss while attacking, or dodging. Nor do you get wound penalties as you become increasing fatigued nor do you lose HP for fighting a 400 round battle.

The fatigue model works better for me, both narratively (no fighters getting stabbed with a longsword for the 10th time in a row) and logically: I can more easily accept fatigue not causing penalties as opposed to serious wounds not causing wound penalties.

I also would be okay with a 5 minute full heal... ideally, I'd keep it at least to a 1/2 hour, but if we ever get 5 minute full heals, I'll simply say, "You're great athletes, and you've recovered your wind, go get'em!!!" Obviously dailies would have to be removed.