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

[glass]

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?

I'd be fine with it at 5 minutes.

If I could cope with 2e and 3e's non-nonsensical healing rules (and I did, for years), then I can easily cope with fully per encounter hit points -it would make much more sense than previous methods, although 4e's version is even better.


glass.

 

[glass]

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

He has been misinformed; it is actually 55-45 not 50-50.

Although I think that probably isn't what you meant.



glass.

 

[Bagpuss]

If that were the case, I would expect some sort of penalities for fighting with a sword wound on your shoulder and greenstick fracture in your forearm. However, there isn't one. You are, for all intents and purposes, fully healed.

Why? In every edition of D&D you had no penalties when you were fighting the day before on 1 hp, why would you become worse off after a nights rest?

 

[Jeff Wilder]

What I don't understand is why you can't apply the same level of creativity to the 4e system? Is it just that you've done such a good job of this justification that you can't see that it could be done any other way?

The "bloodied" condition implies injury, albiet minor. The closer-to-death math of low HP is the same, and works in the same way. Is there no way you can reconcile the 6 hour rest making you "fully functional?"

If you can imagine 1HP with no minuses as injured but-ready-for-more, why can't you imagine full HP as the same state?

Only because there's no way to model longer-lasting injuries in 4E. (As far as we know. There may well be, at which point my objection to 4E healing is withdrawn.)

Folks seem to be conflating my objection to the lack of any modeling of long-term healing with an objection to healing surges and second wind. Please don't. I like the healing surge mechanic. I've really got no problem with being at full HP for every single fight ... as long as there's some way in which -- mechanically -- a fight takes more out of you than a six-hour rest can completely cure.

Ask yourself this: Why six hours? Why not simply say "five minutes after every fight, you're completely healed"?

 

[Bagpuss]

I think it would be a lot more agreeable if class powers provided the needing healing. Perhaps anyone who camps with a cleric gets all their hp back or something. I could live with that.

Ah so lets force someone to play the Cleric again...

 

[FitzTheRuke]

Ask yourself this: Why six hours? Why not simply say "five minutes after every fight, you're completely healed"?

Because part of HP loss is fatigue, and you're frikkin' tired?

 

[Jeff Wilder]

Complete and Utter Hogwash. HP does not = injury and it never has.

Sure it does. Poison is delivered by "injury." Spells are "cure light wounds. And so on and so on.

D&D, until 4E, has always modeled injury. Very abstractly, but always.

If I am level 1 and I take 90% of my hp in damage, so I Was injuried to with in 10% of my life, do I heal faster or as fast or slower then a 10th level fighter who has taken 90% of his damage and was with in 10% of his life?

If you're level 1 with 10 HP and are down to 1 HP, it takes you nine days to heal. If you're level 10 with 100 HP, down to 10 HP, it takes you nine days to heal.

Injury and healing in D&D has never been perfect. In a lot of ways, I like 4E healing better. But every D&D prior to 4E has modeled long-term injury, at least in "days." Deny it all you like. Conflate my objection to six-hour perfect-healing with an objection to healing surges (which I don't have) all you like. It remains objectively true.

 

[Jeff Wilder]

Because part of HP loss is fatigue, and you're frikkin' tired?

In other words, "six hours and fully healed" is more believable to you than "five minutes and fully healed," right?

 

[AZRogue]

I don't know. I imagine that if the RAW doesn't contain some option to include Wound points or some such then it will soon become a popular House Rule. Maybe it will be in the next Unearthed Arcana.

As for me, for the grittier games, I've already decided that the healing will stay will the same BUT, each time the PC is taken to 0 hit points or less he will lose a point of Con. It takes one week to get a point of Con back. Oh, and I have a scar table around here somewhere. You have to roll on the scar table, too.

 

[baberg]

I've really got no problem with being at full HP for every single fight ... as long as there's some way in which -- mechanically -- a fight takes more out of you than a six-hour rest can completely cure.

I think the answer is "because doing it that way makes the game less fun"

A friend of mine in high school was showing off his butterfly knife to a girl and held the grip by the wrong end. The end result was his index finger tendon was severed (and ironically it was the girl's father who ended up stitching him back together). For the next month or so his finger was immobilized and he had to write with his left hand.

I can see a stray arrow or sword slash causing the same injury, so therefore the questing group would be out of action for a month because their fighter can't wield a sword. That doesn't seem like fun to me.

Broken bones, severed tendons, concussions, internal bleeding - all of these things would happen in the course of an average dungeon fight. But the aftereffects of these things would not make for very fun gameplay. I think HP and the "6 hours and you're good to go again" mechanic are designed that way because it makes the game go faster, be more entertaining, and have less frustration than the more simulation-style gameplay you seem to favor.