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

[satori01]

This change is a good change and here are the reasons why:

1) now what happens, if a condition, or serious healing is needed, the party will attempt to find someplace secure to rest, either by leaving the dungeon, using Rope Trick, or Mord's Mag Mansion. Player X will prepare the needed spell and thus rest a day. Player X will cast said spell, and other casters capable of healing will prepare/cast all healing spells. The PC group will now rest another day so that the spellcasters can get the spell loadout they want and the game can now continue.

This type of "action" is so routine in the game, it is almost like missing time, everyone acknowledges that 2 days have passed and now it is back to our regularly scheduled programing. It is a speed bump, a hickup, and one that often times makes the DM complicit in the farce. I know as a DM, sometimes the rolls have not gone the players way, more damage was taken early, than was expected, and you are stuck in the difficult position of doing the "realistic" thing of constantly attacking the players and thus denying rest, all the time knowing that you are delaying the true action you had written.

2) By allowing extended rest to heal to full, you eliminate the need for the "mundane" magic items that are so much resource management but have no "wow" factor.
Your wands of Cure Serious Wounds, Wands of Remove Blindness or Lesser Restoration etc. These magic items are like the equivalent of finding out that the mileage and gas you used on a trip are tax deductible. Obviously not like the thrill of winning $200 on a hand of blackjack, but useful, in that Accountants & Actuarial Table sort of way that D&D descends into.

3) The rule keeps in place the best part of resting: The A team like quest to secure the perfect "spot" to heal up. In 3.5 Mord's Mag Mansion makes this trivial, but again I like the fact that the "spot" is only needed for 1 day. One could argue that thematically this makes more sense. Sam & Frodo did not camp out in one spot in Mordor for a three day weekend. They scurried and hid, finding some awful stretch of real estate to spend some uncomfortable scared hours trying to regain enough strength for the next day......this is what resting should be....not the days long, need a doctors note to go back to work because I have been away to long, fest it currently is.

 

[kennew142]

Why bother worrying about your character dying (even though I haven't killed off a PC in over 20 years) when you are at full HP the next morning, ready to take on another dragon or demon or godling or orc horde or whatever? Suspension of disbelief is gone.

I killed one of the players in a 4e playtest module just last weekend. Fear of dying is still present in the game.

I understand the complaint that a lot of folks have about healing completely overnight breaking their suspension of disbelief. It was my reaction as well. Heck, I still feel it. That said, I don't think it actually makes a difference. In earlier versions of D&D, few characters suffered debilitating injuries either. Clerics, druids, wands of healing, etc... always patched them back up in no time.

D&D HP have always been abstract. For the first time, the mechanics now reflect the flavor text.

 

[Propheous_D]

Personally I have NO problem with it at all. It puts control of extended healing were it should. The hands of the DM. If I want to have the PC's go though some extended healing its easy I strike them with some kind of plot device like a broken leg or a disease they can't seem to cure that has them crippled and bed ridden.

Gone are the days were the PC's have to camp out in the cave using the Rope Trick spell to stay hidden just so that he cleric can blow 3 days worth of healing to get the party up.

Gone are the days I have to supply lots of healing items so the PC's don't have to stop mid adventure to catch their breath.

 

[Cadfan]

I killed one of the players in a 4e playtest module just last weekend. Fear of dying is still present in the game.

I bet it is!

 

[CinnamonPixie]

Because the PCs are heroes and therefore capable of not only surviving more punishment than the ordinary person, but also because they're capable of ignoring that punishment and fighting on at full efficiency. Getting all your hp back from rest or healing surges doesn't mean you've mystically regenerated all of your wounds (well, not unless you were healed by magic), it means you've stuffed a bandage in that sword wound on your shoulder, splinted that greenstick fracture in your forearm, and cowboy'd up to carry on the fight. Ordinary people don't do that, and thus the PC healing rules don't apply to them. To use a current-edition example, it's like how only PCs and major NPCs get action points in Eberron.

And on THAT logic Frodo wouldn't have needed all that time in Rivendale to recover after being rescued by the giant Eagles. And the saving throws in the game are a joke. 50/50?! That's a joke, right?! No matter how powerful or nasty the creature is you get a 50/50 chance to save... So shaking off the common cold and mummy rot, or the lycanthrope's bite, or a vampire's bite, is all the same in terms of difficulty and power against your body?! *lol*

Hey, why not... The game is set up now so that the 10th level Wiz and Fit have the same base attack and defense bonuses... So my wiz if buffed now, or your fighter is prancing around in a tiara and tutu saying "pweef don hurt me".

 

[Jeff Wilder]

Because HP loss doesn't model wounds which impair your fighting efficiency?

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.

4th Edition is a larger-than-life fantasy action movie, and every PC is as tough as John McClane.

Think of the Die Hard series of movies.

Which Die Hard movie was it in which John McClane was knocked unconscious (and 1 HP from death) and then in perfect fighting form six hours later? Why aren't people assuming that McClane starts at 80 HP and ends Die Hard with 1 HP? That still works, right?

I know that "overnight" is a lot faster than "two days of bedrest," but I'm not sure that either breaks suspension of disbelief meaningfully more than the other.

For you, right? For some of us, including I suspect the original poster, it's not so much a matter of how much time, certainly not once you're talking "two days or less." It's that one of those has a world-consistent explanation for it -- magical healing, which actually exists in the game as a resource -- and one has absolutely no explanation.

Sometimes your suspension of disbelief will run up against the concept of hit points. In which case I suggest making them match.

How far does this go? Just how far is everyone who would like to play 4E expected to bear the burden of the game's disregard for suspension of disbelief? Is every 4E critic -- pretty much all of whom cite the game breaking suspension of disbelief, in one new rule or another -- just being unreasonably unwilling to accept everything in the game and invent rationales for it?

Is there is any point at which you -- that's the generic second-person there -- would not accept being at full HP following a rest? Three hours? An hour? Twenty minutes? Seriously, where would your suspension of disbelief break? How would you feel about it?

If the healing rules wouldn't break your suspension of disbelief, ever, then it doesn't really matter to you what the rules are, right?

On the other hand, if your suspension of disbelief doesn't happen at six hours, but would at five minutes, consider this: I was fine with 3.5's "days to fully healed" objective silliness, so it took "days" to break my suspension of disbelief. If yours doesn't break at six hours, but does at five minutes, you're only "hours" away. And maybe 5E will get rid of those hours, and we'll be down to five minutes.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

Yeah, in any other edition that fall out the window would be (as long as you had even one HP left)

"You're fine, you can keep fighting, you have no penalties! Be careful of the goblin child with his sharpened chicken bone, though, he could kill you! BUT - if you don't get magically healed you're gonna need LOTS of rest tomorrow! Unless you don't have time for it -- then you can keep adventuring with no penalties, but keep an eye out for that goblin!"

I don't see how these rules are any LESS realistic than that.

OBVIOUSLY, we've all ALWAYS found our own justifications, and that's a good thing!

It's called role-playing, and guess what? IT STILL EXISTS!

I plan to rule that my players need to role-play a minor injury of their own design, by paying attention to the damage source that caused them to get "bloodied" and a slightly more major injury on any shot that brought them down.

Fall off a roof and get bloodied? Role-play a limp, or injured arm, or sore back.
Gat hit by an ogre's club that brought you down? You're wearing a bloody bandage and are wracked with headaches for a few days.
Etc

You don't really need minuses, 'cause they make it NOT FUN to play, and besides, if a battle breaks out your heroes SUCK IT UP and ignore their pain while they fight (adrenaline).

But role-playing doing heroic things WHILE injured? LOTSA FUN.

Fitz

 

[Cadfan]

But he was cured by a horse

Find me a rule that says a horse cannot have maximum ranks in Heal!

 

[Puggins]

D&D has never modeled long term injury- either you're fine or you're comatose/dead. This new system doesn't model long term injuries either, but it at least gets rid of a fairly ridiculous concession that models nothing but makes recovery annoying as hell.

A fighter who gets reduced to 1hp has absolutely no problem fighting at full capacity. Sure, he's tired out, nicked and bruised and a bit dizzy, but he can swing his sword as perfectly as he did at the beginning of the day. He has no broken bones, no internal bleeding, no wounds that are infection hazards. Why, then, is it so hard to imagine that a single night's rest is all he needs to recover his strength?

If you want to include serious injuries then hit points aren't going to be a significant part of that system. A guy who drops 5 feet could shatter an ankle easily, despite suffering only 1d6 damage. He sure as hell wouldn't be able to heal it in a few days either- better hope the orcs are still holding those prisoners six weeks from now.

There are precious few injuries that are serious enough to require several day's rest yet not serious enough to impact combat performance. D&D simply assumes those injuries are not worth simulating, and I'm inclined to agree- no one wants Gerrick the fighter bed-ridden for weeks on end because Nyarlothaug the Pit Fiend stepped on Gerrick's ankle and broke it. They want Gerrick standing over Nyarlothaug's smoldering corpse or dead on the ground, yet another victim of Nyarlothaug's reign of terror.

 

[Ulorian - Agent of Chaos]

And the saving throws in the game are a joke. 50/50?! That's a joke, right?! No matter how powerful or nasty the creature is you get a 50/50 chance to save... So shaking off the common cold and mummy rot, or the lycanthrope's bite, or a vampire's bite, is all the same in terms of difficulty and power against your body?! *lol*

I don't think saving throws work that way... I think you've been misinformed.